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THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 



THE 



PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 



BY 



GEORGE HERBERT PALMER 

ALFORD PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



an 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1911 






COrVRIGIIT, 191 !, BY OKOROE HERBERT PALMER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Publishtd Xoitmbir iqn 



V 

©CI, A3' 



PREFACE 

The following chapters are the substance of 
a course of lectures delivered in 1909 before 
the Lowell Institute of Boston. Delivered 
without notes, they were carefully reported 
and subsequently much revised. 

The circumstances of their delivery were, 
I feel sure, favorable to certain good habits 
which I have tried to retain. My hearers, 
though exceptionally intelligent and critical, 
were for the most part untrained in the sub- 
ject. Being hearers too and not readers, they 
constantly forced me, if I would be under- 
stood, to turn away from technicalities to- 
ward naturalness of speech ; they led me to 
emphasize crucial points in the argument; 
and then by short sentences, easy transitions, 
and homely illustrations, to make the neces- 
sarily close attention rewarding and agreeable. 
These are useful habits for any one who under- 
takes to treat contentious topics. 

Nor do I see that such adjustments unfit 
a discussion for consideration by specialists. 



VI PREFACE 

Such men, it is true, rightly lay stress on full- 
ness of knowledge, fresh points of view, 
candor in observation, and a scientific spirit. 
But lucidity is not unfriendly to these worthy 
qualities. Bishop Berkeley bids us " to think 
with the learned and speak with the vulgar." 
I wish I were able to conform myself to the 
precept of this profound and limpid writer. 
But at least I will offer here a fairly intel- 
ligible, systematic, and in some respects not 
unoriginal survey of an intricate, ancient, and 
ever-present problem. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Meaning of Freedom 

1. Repellent intricacy of the subject and its dogmatic 

treatment in the past 1 

2. Yet a classic problem and unescapable .... 4 

3. In considering it absence of partisanship essential 7 

4. First conception of freedom as absence of alien 

interference 10 

5. Full definition 15 

6. Critical examination of definition 19 

7. Importance of starting with definition .... 21 

II. The Improbability of Freedom 

1. Strength of the deterministic doctrine .... 24 

2. Reign of law in the physical world 25 

3. In the mental 29 

4. Implications of determinism in the nature of the 

human mind 31 

5. The predictability of conduct 35 

6. Prediction not distasteful . 39 

7. Varieties of determinism 44 

III. The Probability of Freedom 

1. What libertarianism must establish 50 

2. The consciousness of freedom 52 

3. Kant's moral metaphysics 56 

4. Criticism of subjective evidence 57 

5. Praise and blame 60 

IV. The Reply to Determinism 

1. Partial agreement of the two theories .... 71 

2. Divergence on the nature of the person .... 74 



Vlll CONTENTS 

3. Explanation of the predictability of conduct . . 75 

4. Peculiarities of self-prediction. Fallacious state- 

ments of determinism 81 

V. Kinds of Causation 

1. Illustration of a railroad train 93 

2. Names of the contrasted causes 90 

3. The field of antesequeutial causation .... 99 

4. Summary of the doctrine 102 

5. Relation to determinism 104 

VI. The Working of Ideals 

1. Value of objections 109 

2. Does not an ideal work sequentially ? . . . .110 

3. The reflex action of ideas 113 

4. Ideals as antesequential 117 

5. The nature of desire 122 

6. The ideal and the real 125 

7. Summary 127 

VII. Chance 

1. Freedom impossible without chance 128 

2. Subjective chance, or uncertainty 189 

3. Objective chance, or coexistence 13-1 

4. Antesequential cause requires sequential . . . 140 

5. Varieties of coordi nation investigated by science 1 15 

6. Total condition of the universe as a cause . . . 147 

7. Summary 149 

VIII. The Limitations of Freedom 

1. Four sets of limitations 151 

2. Physical limitations 152 

3. Psychological limitations 155 

4. Voluntary limitations 157 

5. Moral limitations 1G1 

6. Summary 1C6 



CONTENTS IX 

IX. The Mysteries of Freedom 

1. Two difficulties insurmountable ...... 169 

2. The irrationality of sin ,.170 

3. The connection of mind and body 174 

4. Nature of self the ultimate problem 180 

X. Varieties of Doctrine 

1. No single doctrine of either freedom or determin- 

ism 182 

2. Necessarianism and determinism 184 

3. The liberty of indifference 186 

4. Freedom of self-determination and action . . . 190 

5. Rational freedom 193 

6. Contrasted effects of the two doctrines .... 196 

7. Conclusion 203 

XI. Bibliography 

1. Limits of this bibliography 207 

2. Determinism 208 

3. Idealistic determinism 209 

4. Libertarianism 210 

5. General surveys 211 



THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

CHAPTER I 

THE MEANING OP FREEDOM 



Few subjects are for ordinary mortals so 
difficult and dull as the question of freedom. 
In it mental confusion seems to have secured 
a kind of province of its own from which 
ordered thought has been so excluded that 
the small amount remaining suffices merely to 
provoke acrimony, but not to stir broad and 
dispassionate pursuit. From the first a certain 
meagreness has characterized the discussion 
of freedom. Neither of the parties contending 
over it has appeared able to advance beyond 
a few central assertions. How these were re- 
lated to other beliefs or to the tangled facts 
of life has been but scantily explained. When 
Epicurus proclaimed us free, he spoke of an 
unintelligible accident which since the begin- 
ning of the world has somehow disturbed its 
normal course. And when the Stoics assert 
that necessity governs all, it is hard to see how 



2 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

the erroneous doctrine of freedom could arise, 
or indeed what room remains in a world like 
theirs for error, chance, or wrong. Nor is the 
lack of fullness and clarity less as we turn 
toward modern thought. What Augustine be- 
lieved about free-will, what St. Thomas, no one 
can precisely say, though they and all the men 
of the Middle Ages wrangle over the matter 
with unceasing eagerness, virulence and uncer- 
tainty. The first appearance of the problem 
on English soil is in the dreary discussion of 
Thomas Hobbes with Bishop Bramhall, where 
neither seems to take any interest in what 
his opponent says and each considers what he 
says himself as too obvious for argument. Locke 
follows, a singularly candid writer and one 
ordinarily engaging; but his very ability to 
see much in many directions so confuses his 
account of Power that at the close of that 
laborious chapter a reader is hardly wiser than 
at the beginning. The smart epigrams of 
Hume's Essay on Liberty and Necessity, 
while making it evident that all who dissent 
from the simple doctrine there preached are 
probably fools, leave behind them an uncom- 
fortable doubt whether Hume himself may 
not be about as blind as his adversaries. 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 3 

In view of such slender results certain moral- 
ists of our time have begun to ask whether 
the age-long controversy might not now pro- 
fitably cease and human conduct be approached 
from points of view more accessible and of a 
more comprehensive outlook. The most not- 
able advocate of such a policy is Henry Sidg- 
wick, who in his Methods of Ethics sums up 
with singular fairness the arguments for and 
against freedom, and concludes that they are 
substantially balanced, each side in itself con- 
vincing but neither providing room for the 
material presented by its opponent. Our wisest 
course is therefore to let the whole subject 
alone — an easy matter, since no practical issue 
is involved. Persons act, he thinks, substan- 
tially alike whether libertarians or determinists. 
Professor Sidgwick's plan has commended itself 
to several later writers. The valuable recent 
book by Professors Dewey and Tufts, a book 
remarkable for wide observation of human 
needs and daring suggestions of further moral 
advance, does not mention the subject of free- 
dom. Many writers of to-day merely allude 
to it as something too difficult, too threadbare, 
or too unimportant for discussion. 



4 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 
II 

But it is not easy to relegate fundamental 
problems to darkness. The unknown allures. 
Thoughtful men do not rest comfortably in 
ignorance, but repeatedly rouse themselves to 
ask whether such ignorance is really necessary. 
In this case especially there is much which 
prompts to further inquiry. The question is a 
classical one, like the being of God, the nature 
of the state, or the significance of poetry. 
These matters each generation debates, and 
there are few surer signs of the intellectual 
earnestness of an age than the zeal it shows 
over such problems. No age settles them, each 
formulates them anew, but in wrestling with 
them each gains a power and insight not to 
be otherwise obtained. That is what we mean 
by calling freedom a classical problem. It is 
one to which the human mind, however dis- 
couraged, in variably returns, one which always 
proves itself capable of kindling passion, one 
too large for complete solution, but one where 
even partial insight broadens all other appre- 
hension. It is incredible that our critical time 
should refuse to join the earlier inquiring 
multitude, acknowledge itself baffled, and take 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 5 

no share in what has invigorated the past. The 
fancy that it might is a dream of academic 
minds. 

Indeed, as we look closely into the writings 
of those who professedly banish this question, 
we find that in reality they themselves un- 
consciously assume the truth of one or the 
other of the opposed doctrines. Nor can they 
do otherwise if they discuss ethics at all, for 
every part of that science is rooted here and 
changes meaning with our understanding of 
freedom. Accordingly, though at first sight 
forbidding, one can hardly imagine a subject 
which under examination proves more pro- 
foundly interesting. Here we try to learn what 
our nature is. Do we resemble the things 
around us, driven by blind law and incapable 
of modifying it ? Or are we guardians of law 
and is the world in some degree directed by 
our thought? Only so far as we believe it to 
be, do we count ourselves capable of conduct ; 
for I suppose everybody sharply distinguishes 
movement from conduct. Things are as busy 
as we, but we do not call their motions acts. 
Acts are movements so guided that they in 
some sense reflect our purposes. And what is 
that sense ? What right have we to contrast 



6 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

ourselves as persons with the objects around 
us as things ? No doubt we constantly do so, 
but is the distinction sound or superficial? 
In short, is or is not human action a subtler 
variety of physical motion? 

These weighty questions I propose to dis- 
cuss in this book, and I believe them to be 
questions which nearly all my readers will 
already have agitated within their own breasts. 
To many such self-explorers there will have 
come a kind of despair, making them ready 
to say, " I do not know : I may be free, I may 
be determined ; I cannot tell." But surely no 
present bewilderment can close the door on 
knowledge. That was a sagacious remark made 
long ago by Aristotle that " if we must not 
philosophize, then we must philosophize." He 
meant that reason is defeated only by itself. 
In order to know that a problem is insoluble 
we must have reasons for its insolubility, and 
so must already have advanced far in our 
acquaintance with it. Problems set by our own 
nature are unescapable. Closing the eyes does 
not rid us of them. It is wise, then, from time 
to time systematically to face them and also, 
patiently holding them before our hearts and 
minds, to allow them to illuminate and be 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 7 

illuminated by the daily experiences of life. 
The latter important sort of exploration must 
be conducted by each person for himself. To 
the former I here invite my readers. 

in 

For anything like success in so difficult a 
search an open mind is the first requisite. 
Hunters after truth we must be, and heedless 
of everything else. Hortation, enthusiasms, 
the desire to say something uplifting, will be 
out of place here. We are to keep close to 
reality through all its windings and be firm 
against exactitude where it does not exist. If we 
gradually come to believe that the larger truth 
probably lies in a certain direction, we must 
still be as interested in detecting what hinders 
our taking that direction as in the considera- 
tions which favor it. Delight in discovering 
difficulties is a good preservative against error. 
Of course, then, we must start with no side of 
our own. Do not let us suppose we are called 
on to save freedom, to snatch the precious 
thing from unbelievers who, probably with 
malicious intent, are attacking it. Nor, on the 
other hand, let us for a moment imagine that 
the champions of freedom are shown by their 



8 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

holding such a doctrine to be irrational or 
insincere. Conceivably they have not been 
bought up by religion, party, or social preju- 
dice, but may have been led to their conclu- 
sions by what they themselves have seen. 
Partisanship is of course common, but it has 
no more natural connection with one side of 
this controversy than with the other. The 
best we can do is to banish it from our own 
mind and assume it to be absent from the 
mind of him who differs from us. In short, 
in order to make any progress in these per- 
plexing regions our method and interest must 
be dispassionate and scientific. 

Yet if scientific, that interest will have in 
it much that is dramatic too. The drama brings 
before us clashing forces, each relatively jus- 
tified. That is not first-rate drama where a good 
character is overthrown by a knavish one. In 
the best drama noble human nature is arrayed 
against noble human nature, and our sympa- 
thies go forth to both sides. In Sophocles's 
masterpiece of Antigone, the state is set against 
the family, and we are aware how poor man- 
kind would be if either were destroyed. It is 
this jarring of mighty opposites, each necessary 
for the well-being of man, which gives splen- 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 9 

dor to the piece. In Romeo and Juliet the 
family and the individual clash. Just such 
tragedy is en volved in the problem of freedom. 
Two importances are here in conflict. The lib- 
ertarians are keepers of a great truth. They 
vindicate the work of man, the dignity of the 
person, his capacity for self -guidance. And cer- 
tainly life would not be worth living if these 
interests were insecure. But the determinist 
has a matter of no less consequence in his 
charge, for he is defending order, law, the fact 
that in this universe all parts are influenced 
by all. He will not, then, allow a single por- 
tion to set up for itself, as if it possessed all 
worth. He compels each to be submissive to the 
whole. Who can say which of the two claims 
is superior? We cannot discard either, opposed 
though they seemingly are. It must be our 
endeavor to do entire justice to both, repro- 
ducing in our own minds the full stress of 
that on which each insists. 

Such then will be our somewhat scholastic 
and technical task. I shall try to examine our 
subject as a matter of simple science, careless 
of consequences. And I cannot help hoping 
that some of my readers engaged in practical 
affairs may like to look into the mind of a 



10 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

quiet scholar and see how he goes about his 
strange business. To many he will seem to be 
magnifying niceties and concerning himself too 
seriously with abstract ideas. I can only answer 
that a dispassionate search into the principles 
which underlie life, and in the long run shape 
it, is to me engrossing and fruitful beyond 
anything else. Out of such cool contemplation 
comes a strength and happiness which perme- 
ates all my more superficial experiences. Some- 
thing similar I anticipate for my readers. 
While the discussion will not be aimed pri- 
marily at practical ends, the very fact that for 
the time likes and dislikes are laid aside, while 
exact observation and coherent thought sum- 
mon us to do their bidding, should refresh 
and strengthen for the common affairs of the 
day. A sustained argument, too, though call- 
ing for close attention, may have, if well knit, 
plainly worded and freed from extraneous 
matter, the unfolding interest of a story. But 
clearness is vital. To it I sacrifice every other 
grace of style. 

rv 

Two nearly related questions confront us 
at the start : What do we mean by freedom? 



THE MEANING OF FBEEDOM 11 

and do we possess anything of the sort ? These 
two questions usually considered together, I 
sharply divide. This chapter treats only of 
the first. Nothing in it favors either deter- 
minism or libertarianism. All it seeks is to 
discover what we have in mind when talking 
of freedom. We may be altogether deluded. 
Possibly there is no such thing. No human 
being may ever have been able to do other- 
wise than he has done. But even if freedom is 
not a matter of reality, it is a matter of thought. 
In ordinary conversation we constantly speak 
of it. " Peter acted freely, " we say, " in going 
to New York.'* What have we in mind ? If I 
make out here merely the contents of our con- 
sciousness, I shall be satisfied. We may then 
proceed to inquire whether this imagined free- 
dom actually exists. But such an inquiry would 
be futile until we know what we seek to assert 
by either affirming or denying that Peter is 
free. And since in this chapter we are arguing 
no ethical doctrine, but only attempting a bit 
of psychological analysis, I will state a case of 
purported freedom and trace as accurately as 
possible what I at least am there thinking of, 
begging my readers to follow carefully and ob- 
serve whether it is what they too have in mind. 



12 TEE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

Suppose I find that my tall clock has stop- 
ped and I say to some one, "Look into the 
case and see what the matter is." He, having 
looked, calls out, " Of course it must stop. 
The pendulum is not free." I ask, "Not 
free? How so?" To which he replies, "Some- 
body has stuffed paper into the clock-case. 
Every time the pendulum swings, it touches 
the paper slightly, and so is not free." Thus 
far, I suppose, there will be no dispute. All 
will agree that when interference is present 
freedom ceases. This, however, describes free- 
dom only negatively, — free from, — and 
suggests that in order to be altogether free 
our pendulum must be rid of everything ex- 
cept itself . But how far can our thought travel 
in such a direction? Shall all environing in- 
fluences be removed? Gravitation, for example, 
is tugging continually at the ball and drawing 
it toward the centre of the earth. Here is 
interference. And if by some magic art we 
could remove gravitation, should we then have 
made the pendulum more free? I begin to 
doubt and to see that this is not exactly what 
I meant by saying there should be no inter- 
ference. Gravitation or weight is, after all, 
constitutive of the pendulum, so that we could 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 13 

not do away with it and retain the pendulum 
itself. Something similar appears also else- 
where. At its upper end the pendulum is at- 
tached to a pivot, which never ceases to inter- 
fere with its motions, holding it rigidly in 
place. Suppose we detach it, will it gain or lose 
freedom? Evidently lose, for it will then be so 
free as hardly to be free at all. Negative free- 
dom — freedom/rom — has been so greatly en- 
larged that positive freedom — freedom to — 
disappears. Adjustment to environment, which 
seemed at first an interference with freedom, 
is to some extent necessary. Let us then re- 
cast our definition with this fact in view. 

Instead of saying that freedom is the ab- 
sence of interference, suppose we now call it 
the absence of alien interference. Some pres- 
sures assist the pendulum to do its work, 
others prevent. The intruding paper, the 
sticky oil, the too-narrow case are alien inter- 
ference. Lying outside the pendulum, they 
intrude upon its actions, oblige it to express 
them rather than itself, and so check its 
freedom ; whereas interferences of the pivot, 
of gravitation, further the pendulum's de- 
signed end. These may be thought of as in- 
tegral parts of itself. Here then will be our 



14 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

amended definition : the freedom of the pen- 
dulum will mean its ability to express itself, 
unhampered by alien interference. So we our- 
selves, in order to be free, must be detached 
from certain portions of our environment. In 
the circumstances of each of us there is much 
which is not favorable to our best working. 
Environment of this sort we seek to abolish 
and so secure a negative freedom. But this 
is done only with a view to positive freedom, 
the development and expression of our powers 
themselves. Accordingly, in order to decide 
in any specific case whether we are free, we 
should need to know whether the circumstan- 
ces are likely to help or hinder our interests. 
Shall we not say, then, that in the absence 
of alien interference, as thus explained, we 
have a full statement of what is intended by 
human freedom ? I could not say so. Some- 
thing is still lacking. The pendulum does not 
offer a precise picture of myself. Its move- 
ments are of a different type. We suppose at 
least that it does not know what it is about, 
and that I do. It has no consciousness. Pos- 
sibly if we were challenged to prove this, we 
might have difficulty in doing so. But at any 
rate there are no signs that the pendulum is 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 15 

conscious, whereas when anything affects us 
it affects us all through and we perceive 
ourselves to be affected. A curious double 
agency is ours, of doing and at the same 
time knowing that we are doing. The two go 
together — not always, it is true. Many a 
blind movement going forth from every one 
of us allies us with the world of things. 
But these movements do not fall within the 
field of ethics. As moral or personal beings 
we are concerned with conduct only so far as 
it is conscious. If the consciousness is slight, 
then we are but slightly moral. The pendu- 
lum, having none at all, cannot illustrate 
what personal freedom would be. 



Yet perhaps we can best set forth freedom 
as we conceive it in ourselves if we retain our 
illustration and hypothetically modify it. Let 
me endow the pendulum with a consciousness 
it probably does not possess. I will assume 
that it is aware of what is going on as it 
leaves the level, mounts to the right, returns 
on its perfect curve downward, and so climbs 
to the left. Let it even feel a quiet joy in its 
beautiful movement. Would there under such 



16 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

conditions be in it all that, rightly or wrongly, 
we think we find in ourselves ? 

Once more something is lacking ; for the 
pendulum might be merely a spectator, a 
spectator of itself, conscious of all its motions^ 
though without ability to change them. We 
ordinarily believe that in us consciousness is 
a factor and that the actions which proceed 
from us are not precisely what they would be 
if consciousness did not interfere. The pen- 
dulum, we have assumed, has but one way of 
acting and merely contemplates itself acting 
thus. To make it adequately representative 
we should take one further step. Having be- 
gun the process of enriching it with what 
does not properly belong to it, we may as 
well endow it with consciousness in our sense 
of that term. Its ranjje of action will then be 
immensely enlarged. Formerly on reaching 
its summit, it turned and went down. There 
was nothing else to do. And at each stage of 
the descent there was ever but one thing be- 
fore it, one fixed action following upon each 
which it had seen itself perform. But suppose, 
when the pendulum arrives at the point 
where it is usually conscious of descending, 
it could say to itself, " Shall I turn or shall 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 17 

I rise, or shall I stay where I am ? " Suppose 
it were not confined to a single issue, com- 
pelled, however consciously, to take the exact 
plunge it had taken before. Several possibili- 
ties are now open to it, on any one of which its 
attention may fasten. Only so does conscious- 
ness become a factor and the pendulum differ 
utterly from all which swing in our houses. 

Now something of this sort we truly or 
falsely assume in ourselves. We go on the 
supposition that every instant opens before 
us varied possibilities of action, and that we 
may select, choose, decide which one of them 
shall be realized. We are not shut up to the 
single actual present, but through imagina- 
tion press forward to a diversified future, 
foreseeing there many events which would 
differently affect our well-being, and finding 
that as we put our mind on this one or that 
among them it ordinarily occurs. Imagina- 
tion is not, then, as we are apt to suppose, 
the peculiar endowment of a poet. It and the 
attention following in its train are the work- 
ing factors of our daily lives. Through them 
we multiply the pendulum's single issue into 
dual or plural possibilities. And this is the 
full measure of what we have in mind when 



18 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

we talk of being free. We mean that what 
will happen is not fixed, either in the nature 
of the environment or ourselves (negative 
freedom), but that there are before us alterna- 
tive possibilities either one of which, by suit- 
able attention on our part (positive freedom), 
will issue in an actual event. When I rise 
from this table I can go to walk, to bed, or to 
the bookcase. Consciousness, fastening on the 
first, lets the other two go. I say, therefore, 
that I went freely to walk, but please myself 
with thinking that I might just as freely have 
lain down or read. 

Perhaps it will be convenient for future 
reference if we now gather up the results of 
our analysis and state them as a formal 
definition. This will furnish a clear answer 
to the first of our two inquiries, " What do 
we mean when we call ourselves free?" and 
will enable us to advance without ambiguity 
to our second and more important one, " Is 
there any sufficient evidence that we really 
are free?" Throughout this book, then, I 
shall mean by freedom that self-guidance 
through which, for purposes of our own, we 
narrow a dual future possibility to a single 
actual result. 



TEE MEANING OF FREEDOM 19 

VI 

It is so important, however, that all the 
clauses of this definition should be clearly 
understood and felt to be necessary that T pass 
them briefly in review. Self-guidance needs 
little comment. The pendulum has made its 
meaning sufficiently plain. When that was 
directed by anything except itself, it ceased 
to be free. Alien interference and freedom 
were seen to be incompatible ; I can be free 
only so far as I guide myself. We may not 
always be sure whether an interference is or 
is not alien ; but we know that to whatever 
degree it is, we are under constraint. 

In order to possess freedom we must have 
a dual future possibility, dual at least. There 
must jijbe as many as two different courses 
open to us, possibly more. Often, I suppose, we 
have a multitude of things in mind which we 
believe we might accomplish. Two at least 
we must have, e.g., doing this or not doing 
it. When the pendulum became free it ceased 
to be confined to a single issue, being then 
capable of either descending or not descend- 
ing. The possibility of freedom is staked on 
that of the ambiguous future. Where either 



20 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

the environment or our own constitution per- 
mits only a single event to be realized, free- 
dom ceases. Of course, at the last every result 
is simple ; but for the free being no particular 
one is predestined for issue. A process of 
selection from a multitude, all alike possible, 
brings one to existence and checks the rest. 
This selective preference employed in positive 
freedom is usually indicated by the word 
" rather/' a word which I have expanded into 
the phrase for " purposes of our own." 

We often figure freedom as groundless 
selection. I choose A or B out of pure cap- 
rice, counting one of them of no more conse- 
quence than the other. But I do not find that 
men restrict themselves to this narrow usage 
and I shall show hereafter that arbitrary selec- 
tion is in reality destructive of freedom. As 
I wish to formulate a definition acceptable to 
libertarians of every sort, I shall not fashion 
it for the few who champion this liberty of 
indifference. The great body of libertarians 
understand the ambiguous future, on which 
freedom turns, in a far less extreme sense. 
They say that action is undertaken with a 
view to supplying some one of our many 
needs, perhaps the need of action itself. Did 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 21 

we not know ourselves to be incomplete, we 
should remain inert. I stand here and continue 
to stand until I am tired. Only when I need 
a seat do I move toward one. In that seat I 
stay until some sort of action occurs to me 
which promises to remove defects which I at 
the moment experience. I go to dinner because 
I feel myself hungry and desire to remove 
that hunger. Desire is precisely this recogni- 
tion of a contrast between my actual self and 
what I might better be. The representations 
which lead up to action are always of a suppos- 
edly possible future self. These are examined 
to see how betterment may most probably 
arise. I may be mistaken in regard to this, 
may think I shall better myself by some 
course when in reality I shall not. But no 
matter. It is this thought that guides me. And 
so long as my turning in any direction is 
prompted by the aim at betterment, I call my- 
self free. 

VII 

Our fathers used to discuss our problem in 
terms of Free Will. Is the will free, they asked, 
to choose its own good? Such language is no 
longer heard. Scholars now agree that no 



22 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

detachable piece of us — the will — is free, but 
either nothing or the whole of us. Will is 
merely the act of self -direction. The antithesis, 
then, to the free will would not be the con- 
strained will, but no will at all ; and the real 
problem is not whether the will is free, but 
whether the person is so. 

And is he? To that question we have come 
at last, and to it must devote the remainder 
of this volume. We now know precisely the 
point which evidence must illuminate. Is there 
ever an ambiguous future before us? Do 
several possibilities sometimes disclose them- 
selves? And can I by attention shut off one 
of these and adopt another, thus enabling my 
powers to go forth more largely ? These are 
different aspects of that second question with 
which this chapter opened. Discussion of it 
was at that time postponed until some agree- 
ment could be had as regards what should be 
discussed. The absence of such preliminary 
definition has been the commonest cause of 
the small results thus far obtained in this con- 
troversy. Doctrines have been attacked which 
were not those maintained, and others de- 
fended though not attacked, while each an- 
tagonist has often had but a hazy notion of 



THE MEANING OF FREEDOM 23 

what he himself was championing. Ambiguity, 
in short, has been here as elsewhere the deadly 
enemy of scientific advance. Against such am- 
biguity this chapter is a guard. We now un- 
derstand what it is to be free and may decline 
controversy with those who accept or deny 
freedom of other sorts. All we wish to learn 
is whether we are justified in counting our- 
selves free in the sense here explained. 



CHAPTER II 

THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 

I 

It Is highly improbable that any such power 
as has just been defined exists. The evidence 
against an ambiguous future, narrowed by our- 
selves, is so strong that whoever examines this 
alone can hardly fail to regard freedom as a 
fantastic dream. To bring out this adverse 
evidence in all its cogency is our business now. 
Putting ourselves sympathetically at the point 
of view of the determinist, we shall endeavor 
to see what he has seen. His truth must be 
our truth too. Truths neglected by him may 
appear hereafter, but for the present we want 
to feel the utmost force of the determinist's 
positive doctrine. By libertarians this is often 
overlooked or, still worse, misrepresented. We 
must examine it with friendly eyes. Those as- 
pects of it which are tolerably familiar I shall 
treat briefly, developing at greater length cer- 
tain turns of the argument not so generally 
understood. In this way I hope to clear de- 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 25 

terminism of misconception and to set it forth 
as something having a rightful place in human 
thought. Probably the evidence for it can be 
most compactly summed up under three heads : 
that which is derived from the nature of the 
world, from the nature of the human mind, 
and from the nature of society. Experimental, 
psychological, and social proofs I offer in its 
behalf, taking them up in the order named. 

ii 

As we first look out upon the world, it 
seems a loose and heterogeneous affair. In- 
numerable events happen. Here the sun shines 
and moisture rises. There a cloud is forming. 
Now rain begins to fall and grass to grow. 
Soon animals devour the grass, and men them. 
All these are distinct events. Each, so far as 
immediate and unscientific observation goes, 
might occur by itself. But closer inspection 
shows that events which were at first supposed 
to be independent are not really so. No one 
of them quite deserves the name of one, for 
each is inextricably interlocked with others. 
Such interlocking of event with event is what 
we know as causal connection, that is, events 
are parts of one another and come forth in a 



26 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

fixed order. Regularly and throughout the en- 
tire line, A is followed by B, B by C, and C 
by D. Perceiving this, we find our world cal- 
culable and fitted for the habitation of man 
as it could not otherwise be. Without such 
fixity w r e could never anticipate what would 
happen next. Operations involving forecast 
would therefore cease; for what folly it would 
be to erect a house if some day gravitation 
might work upwards instead of down ; or to 
build a railroad, not knowing whether heated 
water would turn into steam or ice; or to 
plant potatoes which might come up as corn 
or cabbage. We could nut train a physician 
in the use of medicines which to-day might 
cure a fever and to-morrow cause one; nor a 
horse, if instruction in harness had no reckon- 
able effect on future habits. Could we even 
take thought ourselves of what we should eat 
or what put on, if one day's experience gave 
no indication of what another would bring 
forth? Of such vast consequence is foresight, 
a power possible only in an ordered universe. 
Civilization reposes on the assumption that 
everywhere events move by fixed sequences 
toward single issues, undisturbed by altern- 
ative possibilities and ambiguous futures. 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 27 

Such sequences constitute our laws of nature, 
which science sets itself to trace through all 
their subtle complications. Of course not all 
are yet known, nor probably ever will be. But 
whenever a new set of ordered sequences is 
observed, man's power enlarges and human wel- 
fare gains fresh security. Properly enough in 
early times men imagined that causal sequence 
governed only a portion of the physical world. 
So long as such connection was traceable but 
a little way, it accorded with the modesty of 
reason to believe that though many occur- 
rences were causally linked, others were not. 
It was not then absurd to suppose that in 
parts of the universe where no linkage of 
phenomena was discoverable caprice of one 
sort or another had a field for exercise. Such 
unoccupied sections of existence were said to 
be ruled by chance. Or since under such con- 
ditions any number of possibilities were alike 
probable and the future wholly ambiguous, it 
was believed that free will, human or divine, 
was often the steadying influence which then 
guided affairs to a desirable issue. Before the 
rise of science a miracle, far from being an 
absurdity, was the sole rational means for sav- 
ing our world from chaos. 



28 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

To-day it is absurd. While we recognize that 
science is still in its infancy, during the last 
three centuries it has progressed far enough 
to convince us that there are no gaps in nat- 
ure. All space is occupied by causation. The 
loose world where chance invites capricious 
will has gradually disappeared. Modern man 
perceives how things hang together, the 
events of to-day springing directly from what 
existed previously and that which existed pre- 
viously no less closely bound up with what 
went still before. It is true that belated lib- 
ertarians sometimes urge that the universe is 
not yet fully explored and that to talk of the 
uniformity of nature, as if causal sequence 
had been demonstrated everywhere, is to speak 
considerably beyond our knowledge. Let us 
then grant that the field of the unknown 
probably exceeds that of the know r n; yet even 
so we may rest secure in the conviction that 
the method of knowledge which has served us 
in the past will not fail us in the future. 
Hitherto wherever science has advanced 
causal sequence has been followed. This 
single clue has been steadily used. It has not 
always conducted to knowledge, but it has 
never itself been proved erroneous. If, then, 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 29 

we suspect that the causes of the Aurora 
Borealis are not yet known, since many ex- 
planations of it have heen proposed and ob- 
jections have been made to them all, we still 
could not listen to one who should say, "Per- 
haps there is no explanation. Probably the 
Aurora is free. Under given conditions it 
may or may not illuminate the sky, without 
cause for either occurrence. Dual possibilities 
may be inherent in it and so one result be as 
likely as another." Should we not reply to 
such a person, "You are born out of due 
time. A few thousand years ago such talk 
might have been possible, but you speak a 
language unintelligible to modern ears. Your 
proper home is the lunatic asylum"? In short, 
to know no cause does not permit us to sup- 
pose that none exists. It rather gives a strong 
stimulus to hunt for one. Search nature as 
widely as we may, we come upon no un- 
prompted change. 

in 

The belief that the material world is a 
world of law and order has now become prac- 
tically universal. That world hangs together. 
Wherever we have experience of it, we find 



30 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

sequential causation, wherever we do not find 
it, we have not full experience. But matter is 
only half the world, perhaps the less import- 
ant half. Mind remains. And surely in our 
turbulent mental life no such fixity rules. In 
that inner world we still talk of casual 
thoughts, arbitrary volitions, of doing as we 
please. Who can find invariable law in such 
a chaos ? 

But in the seeming chaos of the outer 
world science has been so successful in de- 
tecting order that he would be rash who 
should now attempt to set limits to its scope. 
The line dividing the outer from the inner 
world is far from clear. On the whole, it 
seems more reasonable to attribute the confu- 
sion in the latter, as in the former, to lack of 
knowledge rather than to any disjointed con- 
dition of the facts themselves. Mental phe- 
nomena are certainly subtler than material. 
They will not stand and be looked at, but 
must in general be caught on the wing and 
at unawares. Accordingly they are harder to 
analyze. Here more than elsewhere it is diffi- 
cult to determine which member of a complex 
mass of antecedents is connected with a given 
consequent. To enable us to do so, pyscho- 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 31 

logical laboratories have recently been set up 
with facilities for isolating phenomena and 
noting with exactitude in what connections 
they arise. In these laboratories much has al- 
ready been accomplished. While the observ- 
ation of thought has not advanced so far as 
that of things, we are now sure that the mind, 
even in regions commonly accounted most 
capricious, has its laws. The analogy there- 
fore with the physical sciences daily becomes 
stronger. The argument of progressive ap- 
proach applies to both. So far as we have 
knowledge, regularity appears. The field 
where it does not appear continually narrows. 
Shall we not eventually detect causation 
everywhere ? 

IV 

Kant thought we must, but for the curi- 
ous reason that it is observable nowhere. 
Causation, he declared, is not a product 
of experience, but a directing condition by 
means of which experience becomes possi- 
ble. I see A occur and B occur, and B fol- 
lows A. The causal tie between them I do not 
detect. The hammer falls, a sound is heard; 
but did the fall produce the sound? Kant, 



32 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

and Hume before him, asserts that experi- 
mentally we observe only the sequence. Will 
he then deny causation ? On the contrary, he 
affirms it to be universal because a necessity 
of our thought — or in his own clumsy phrase 
a category of the understanding. Causation 
is in us, not in things. He who wears blue 
spectacles sees all things blue. So if our minds 
are made with a causal twist, this cannot fail 
to affect whatever we observe. The changes 
of our inner life, no less than those of our 
outer, will inevitably present themselves in 
causal form. Nothing can escape. If freedom 
implies absence of causation, it may as well be 
dismissed to the limbo of unsubstantial ghosts. 
There is no such thing simply because we 
could not know it if there were. According 
to the previous experimental argument we 
perceive no cases of absent causation ; accord- 
ing to the present one we cannot even con- 
ceive such a case. I oiler this a priori plea 
for the omnipresence of causation, on account 
of its celebrity and in order to exhibit the de- 
terministic case in its entirely. But to assess 
its validity, or even to render it fully com- 
prehensible, would carry us far away into 
Kantian metaphysics. 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 33 

In a modified form, however, this argu- 
ment from our inner structure is familiar 
enough. Everybody inclines to conceive his 
actions as manifestations of a self. Libertar- 
ians especially set up a fictitious entity called 
" I " and endow it with magical powers. Yet 
among the data of our internal life no such 
being is observable. Often finding it neces- 
sary to contrast the total train of thought 
with the notion of its single members, we 
give to the former the title of self, subse- 
quently imposing on ourselves a belief in its 
separate existence. But this is an error. When, 
for example, I decide to live in Cambridge 
rather than in Boston, these two places are 
not ideally presented before a certain me with 
equal possibility ; nor does that me, distinct 
from each, decide the case between them. It 
has no power to remove one from its natural 
setting and give it a sequence which in itself 
it would not possess. The deciding me is 
merely another name for the adjusting men- 
tal process. Cambridge has entered harmon- 
iously into the current of my life a dozen 
times and Boston only three. Or Cambridge 
has perhaps affected that current through a 
wider tract of interests. It, therefore, has a 



34 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

larger influence over my action, though this 
influence was not apparent at first, but grad- 
ually revealed itself in the process of deliber- 
ation. 

So soon as under this closer psychological 
analysis we abandon the notion of a detacha- 
ble ego, libertarianism collapses. If the ego is 
merely a name for the total train of thought, 
it becomes unthinkable that a portion of this 
train should change its position at the bidding 
of that total and be thus brought into colloca- 
tions which would not otherwise arise. It would 
be nonsense for nature to suggest that the 
birch tree clothe its trunk for a space with 
the bark of an oak. There is no nature to 
work the change other than that which in- 
eludes the smooth-barked birch. What one 
does and is are not two things, but only dif- 
fering aspects of the same. In each of us there 
are merely so many possibilities as are covered 
by what we actually are, there being nothing 
to decide between them except that very ego 
which they themselves constitute. Confusion 
on this point is easy. When we once see that 
the mind and its contents are one and the same 
thing, we shall not talk of its dictating to 
them, as if it had a place apart. Our actions 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 35 

proceed from what we are and have been, 
from which — except by external force — they 
cannot be turned aside. 



But beside the disproof of libertarianism 
furnished by scientific observation and the 
nature of the human mind, there remains a 
third class of evidence which has carried even 
wider popular conviction. Belief in determin- 
ism is embedded in the structure of society. 
The predictability of conduct is a condition 
of man's associating with man. We have al- 
ready seen how difficult life would be in a 
physical world where calculation was subject 
to dual possibilities. Figure the situation. I do 
not know whether the sun will rise to-mor- 
row. It did rise to-day. I noticed it yesterday, 
and people tell me it has risen for many years. 
But after all, if the causal sequence is not 
tight, why expect that coming times will re- 
semble past ? It is grounded expediency which 
makes our world a fit place to dwell in. 
Equally true is this of the world of men. I at 
least do not see how we could live together 
had we no power to forecast each other's 
conduct. My act has reference to yours. In 



36 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

proportion as yours is uncertain, mine must be 
thrown out of gear. I am a teacher ; would my 
class assemble at nine o'clock if they could 
not reckon on my presence ? Should I myself 
appear if I had no reasonable expectation of 
finding them ? How could commerce proceed, 
or travel, churches, theatres, courts, or govern- 
ments, if the act of one man could not be 
coordinated with fair certainty to that of 
another? 

It may be said that this certainty is only 
fair, that members of my class surprise me 
by their absence every day. But I should not 
be surprised if I regarded them as beings 
endowed with ambiguous futures, as likely 
therefore to act in one way as another, beings 
whose conduct not even divine wisdom could 
foresee. No, the uncertainty here is not 
unlike that felt in watching an approaching 
storm-cloud. Will it rain ? Undoubtedly, if 
such and such conditions are present. And 
are they? Of this we have only partial know- 
ledge. In both cases, connections may be re- 
cognized as unalterably fixed and yet about the 
result our judgment may waver. All the de- 
terminist asserts is that given antecedents are 
followed by invariable consequents even in the 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 37 

very complex circumstances of human inter- 
course; that the more fully these anteced- 
ents are understood, the more confidently we 
can predict results ; and that regularly among 
friends and acquaintances they are in fact so 
fully understood that here we have something 
like a working certitude. All this predictability 
of conduct he finds incompatible with the liber- 
tarian fancy of multiple possibilities. Hume 
has so powerful a passage comparing our as- 
surance of personal and physical events that I 
transcribe it entire : — 

When we consider how aptly natural and mo- 
ral evidence unite together and form only one chain 
of argument, we shall make no scruple to allow that 
they are of the same nature and derived from the 
same principles. A prisoner who has neither money 
nor interest discovers the impossibility of his es- 
cape as well when he considers the obstinacy of 
the gaoler as the walls and bars with which he is 
surrounded ; and in all attempts for his freedom 
chooses rather to work upon the stone and iron of 
the one than upon the inflexible nature of the 
other. The same person, when conducted to the 
scaffold, foresees his death as certainly from the 
constancy and fidelity of his guards as from the 
operation of the axe or wheel. His mind runs along 
a certain train of ideals : the refusal of the soldiers to 



38 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

consent to his escape ; the action of the executioner ; 
the separation of the head and body ; bleeding, con- 
vulsive motions, and death. Here is a connected 
chain of natural causes and voluntary actions ; but 
the mind feels no difference between them in 
passing from one link to another, nor is less cer- 
tain of the future event than if it were connected 
with the objects present to the memory or senses 
by a train of causes, cemented together by what we 
are pleased to call a physical necessity. The same 
experienced union has the same effect on the mind, 
whether the united objects be motives, volition, and 
actions, or figure and motion. We may change the 
names of thing?, but their nature and their opera- 
tion on the understanding never change. 

Were a man whom I know to be honest and opul- 
ent and with whom I lived in intimate friendship, 
to come to my house, where I am surrounded with 
my servants, I rest assured that he is not to stab 
me before he leaves it in order to rob me of my 
silver standish ; and I no more suspect this event 
than the falling of the house itself, which is new 
and solidly built and founded. But he may have 
been seized with a sudden and unknown frenzy. 
So may a sudden earthquake arise, and shake and 
tumble my house about my ears. I shall therefore 
change the suppositions. I shall say that I know with 
certainty that he is not to put his hand into the fire 
and hold it there till it be consumed ; and this event 
I think I can foretell with the same assurance as 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 39 

if he throw himself out of the window, and meet 
with no obstruction, he will not remain a moment 
suspended in the air. No suspicion of an unknown 
frenzy can give the least possibility to the former 
event, which is so contrary to all the known prin- 
ciples of human nature. A man who at noon leaves 
his purse full of gold on the pavement of Charing 
Cross may as well expect that it will fly away like 
a feather as that he will find it untouched an hour 
after. About one half of human reasonings con- 
tain inferences of a similar nature attended with 
more or less of certainty, proportioned to our ex- 
perience of the usual conduct of mankind in each 
particular situation. (Essay xxxix, sec. viii.) 



VI 

Possibly we may find such prediction offens- 
ive, and feel that if it applies to us our 
character is impaired. Were I completely a 
person, I may imagine, prediction of my 
acts would be impossible. So long as I am but 
a creature of habit, not widely different from 
the objects about me, of course I can be pre- 
dicted. In all of us there are large tracts which 
have not come under personal control. With- 
in this region, it may be thought, prediction 
works. But in whatever degree we conceive a 
human being as a person we remove him from 



40 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

the sphere of prediction. Prediction is some- 
thing derogatory. As we honor the dignity 
of mankind we must hold hard to a belief 
in freedom. 

I remember how surprised I was years ago 
on suddenly discovering that this sort of talk 
expresses exactly the opposite of the truth. 
Like everybody else, I grew up a libertarian. 
When a young man, I was fond of playing 
chess. One day as I was deliberating over a 
move in the middle of a game I suddenly 
asked myself whether an expert standing be- 
side me could predict what that move would 
be. Not, I saw, unless I had a past history as 
a chess player with which he was familiar. If 
I were a beginner, he could not tell whether 
I would advance a pawn three squares, or 
move a castle aslant, or expose my queen to 
capture. All these, and a multitude of other 
possibilities would be open to me and there- 
fore to his prediction. But if I had a knowledge 
of the game, these possibilities would be closed. 
And if I were an accomplished player, the ex- 
pert at my elbow might whisper to his neigh- 
bor, " There is only one move he can make. 
He must attack his opponent's king with his 
black bishop. " As I then, without hearing the 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 41 

remark, proceed to make that move, should 
I feel belittled to have the expert announce 
that it was foreknown? Should I feel that 
having supposed my act to be one of freedom, 
I had now been deprived of something pre- 
cious and myself degraded into a mere thing ? 
On the contrary, I should probably feel much 
flattered and congratulate myself on being, 
and being known to be, a player guided by 
law. Evidently, then, as personality enlarges, 
conduct becomes more predictable. That was 
the impressive lesson taught me by this striking 
case. An endowment of freedom, where all 
things are equally likely, is no blessing but a 
sign of incapacity. We should desire to be 
rid of it and should count ourselves well off 
when we come under such necessity as is here 
described. 

But how widely does this principle obtain ? 
Apparently throughout human intercourse. 
Suppose, for example, that John and I were 
summoned to report on an affair in which we 
two were engaged last week, and I should say, 
" Since John is a free person, there is no tell- 
ing what account he will give. It may be the 
truth, or an utterly false tale. We cannot pre- 
dict." He certainly would not think me com- 



42 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

plimentary ; nor, on the other hand, would he 
resent my saying that there was only one 
statement open to him, that nothing but the 
truth could issue from his lips. That is in re- 
ality what we all desire, to be such truthful 
persons that we simply cannot tell a lie, such 
courteous persons that no word of querulous- 
ness ever escapes us. The more thoroughly we 
are narrowed down to such single issues, the 
prouder we justly are. 

It may be suspected, however, that what we 
like here is not the escape from freedom but 
the attribution to us of some praiseworthy act. 
Let us examine then an indifferent case, into 
which no praise or blame enters. Suppose John 
and I have been living together intimately for 
a long time, and one morning as I am dress- 
ing, another acquaintance enters the room. 
To him John whispers, " Observe him ! When 
he comes to his coat, he will put in his left 
arm first." If John should tell me of this after 
I was dressed, I should not be annoyed. I 
should smile and say, " How pleasant, my dear 
fellow, to have you know me rather better than 
I know myself." 

Yet I do not profess that it is always agree- 
able to be predicted. In the last case predic- 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 43 

tion would be offensively intimate if offered 
by a stranger. And for a still more question- 
able case take the following : When I am be- 
ginning my lecture some morning I notice 
that Mr. Smith is absent. I tell the class that 
he will appear at four minutes past nine, on 
entering will pass in front of my desk, waving 
his hand as he goes, will advance a dozen steps 
beyond, and then turn back to take a seat 
beside the door. When he has gone through 
this performance, I address him thus : "Mr. 
Smith, you evidently think yourself a free man 
and bear yourself with a good deal of confid- 
ence. But let me say that you are completely 
determined. In each of your late movements 
there was only a single issue open to you, 
and I foretold it. To all this company I ex- 
plained precisely what you were going to do." 
Would he not feel uncomfortable, as if wound 
up with a spring to which somebody else held 
the key? 

Probably what strikes us here as uncanny 
in contrast with the preceding cases, is that 
Mr. Smith's actions do not seem his own, but 
to have been so shaped by outside influence 
as to be comprehensible without regard to 
himself. Remove suspicion of this sort, and 



44 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

the annoyance ceases. Seeing Mr. Smith's 
perplexity, I hasten to add, "Do not imagine 
that you have been calculated like an eclipse. 
It is yourself that has interested me. I knew 
your -wish to be present to-day and that you 
would come as promptly as possible. But the 
train does not arrive, I noticed, till a few 
minutes past nine. Your dislike, too, of bad 
air in lecture-rooms is well known. Before 
you took your seat I expected you to make 
sure that the window was open, which, with 
your poor sight, you cannot ascertain without 
pressing forward to examine ; and I recalled the 
deprecatory gesture with which you usually 
pass my desk. Your seat is by the door, and 
to that you would naturally return when secure 
of proper ventilation. " In all likelihood re- 
marks of this kind would put an end to his 
annoyance ; for what troubles us is not predic- 
tion, but the possibility that prediction is based 
on something external to ourselves. Let it 
be once seen that forecast comes from observa- 
tion of established character, and we are not 
perturbed. 

VII 

But this case discloses how there may be 
several varieties of determinism, and to distin- 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 45 

guishing them I devote the concluding section 
of this chapter. We might understand that 
though we apparently steer ourselves, the con- 
siderations thus far adduced indicate that man 
is a creature of circumstance. The projectile, 
as it moves through the air from the cannon's 
mouth, might naturally enough suppose, had 
it consciousness, that its course was directed 
by its own will ; it would mistake forces of the 
universe for its own force. Just so the total 
framework of things passes through us also 
and cannot be evaded. An act may indeed be 
called mine in the same sense as perfume may 
be attributed to a blossom. But the forces 
which form that blossom spread far and wide, 
converging upon it from sun, shower, soil, air, 
and all the physical, chemical, and biologic 
agencies which encompass it. The flower is 
but their meeting-point. And just as we have 
seen how throughout the physical universe 
there is probably no ambiguous future nor 
any possibility other than has actually appeared, 
so I must believe that before I was born the 
chain of circumstance was tightly joined and 
every act that has since proceeded from me 
was already fixed in the constitution of 
things. 



46 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

This is the famous doctrine of necessity, 
with its two branches of fatalism and prede- 
stination. Whoever holds it, yet believes that 
from an infinite intelligence things ultimately 
come, will figure its necessity as the predestina- 
ting will of God. Whoever is disposed to think 
of mind as incidental, or itself produced by 
material conditions, will talk of blind fate. 
In both cases alike the individual is impotent, 
only seemingly a factor in the sequence of 
events. Conduct is the product of the total 
whole. 

Before the popular mind this doctrine threat- 
eningly stands as the alternative of libertarian- 
ism, and many a volume has been written to 
combat it. But so far as I know, it is held by 
no living teacher of ethics. Formerly it was 
common enough. Materialistic thinkers of 
Greece, Rome, France, and England maintained 
it with warmth. To-day it is gone, though still 
leading of course a vagrant life among the 
populace, the uninstructed, and such devotees 
of physical science as are besotted with a blind 
hatred of humanism. But no careful scholar 
defends it. Necessarianism is a spectre of the 
past. John Stuart Mill, under the prompting 
of Hume and Jonathan Edwards, substituted 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 47 

for it the doctrine of determinism, and this 
has ever since been the regular theory of our 
time for all who are repelled by the improba- 
bilities of freedom. 

Accordingly the old necessarian formula 
that conduct is a product of circumstance is 
now changed so as to read that it is a pro- 
duct of circumstance and character. This second 
factor is even thought necessary for render- 
ing the first intelligible, for circumstance 
is a slippery term, seeming to name something 
fixed, but indicating in reality what changes 
with the character of him who is circumstanced. 
We cannot say, for example, whether a given 
environment is favorable or hostile, enfeebling 
or stimulating, until we know what kind of 
man is environed. Between the two factors in- 
teraction goes on so that the one is continually 
modified by the other. Convinced that no act 
proceeds from us uncaused, the determinist 
maintains that if the facts of a man's character 
were fully known — his inheritance, history, 
habits, powers, defects and peculiarities — and 
if to this were added a complete acquaintance 
with his surroundings, his conduct could be 
calculated with the same certainty as the mo- 
tions of the earth. Of course we never can 



48 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

know this complex mass of mutually influen- 
tial facts and accordingly our predictions are 
never altogether exact. Different degrees of 
consequence too are attached to the two fact- 
ors by different determinists. Those who think 
circumstance more important, so approaching 
more nearly the old necessarianism, have been 
called hard determinists, while the soft determ- 
inists, because they lay the chief stress on 
inner conditions, are not always easy to dis- 
tinguish from moderate libertarians. We must 
not be misled by names nor imagine that the 
varieties of earnest thought can be bound up 
together and ticketed with neat labels. Divers- 
ities are too precious to be standardized. Yet 
I shall gain brevity and dramatic interest in 
this discussion if I employ the general term 
determinism to indicate a disposition to find 
the grounds of conduct in the past character 
and circumstances of him who acts. The fact 
that character is taken into account will add 
no real ambiguity to a man's future. For the 
man and the character are one and the same, 
and it is accordingly meaningless to say that 
a man can act unlike his character. Whatever 
comes from him, determinism asserts, expresses 
just that man, so circumstanced at that partic- 



THE IMPROBABILITY OF FBEEDOM 49 

ular moment. There is then neither within us 
nor without an ambiguous future possible nor 
room for capricious chance. We should think 
of the entire universe as embodied law. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 

I 

Such is the weighty argument for determ- 
inism, which must convince any one who 
listens to it alone. And even when the liber- 
tarian brings to light certain sections of truth 
here neglected, it does not lose its worth. Re- 
presenting the working faith of the naturalist, 
it is a needful supplement to the contrasted 
point of view of the humanist. To the world's 
progress its contribution has been at least as 
great as that of its companion. In every age 
the ideal of an orderly universe has been es- 
sential to man's peace and power. 

But a libertarian belief has always existed 
side by side with this, its rival, and on the 
whole has been the faith most approved by 
common sense. Of late years it has gained in 
favor as a philosophic doctrine, and to-day 
some form of it counts perhaps a majority of 
ethical students among its adherents. The great 
transformation too in the opposing doctrine, 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 51 

and the substitution of the mild sway of 
modern determinism for the ancient despotism 
of necessity, is thought by many to show that 
freedom is advancing and its foes retreating* 
I should rather say that the men of our time 
do not so readily array themselves in parties 
as did their fathers, are consequently more 
open to mutual understanding and to adopting 
in part beliefs from which as a whole they 
may dissent. Perhaps then even those who are 
convinced determinists will not be indisposed 
to hear what can be said for libertarianism. It 
is the object of this chapter to set forth the 
argument in its behalf no less strongly than 
in the last chapter the evidence was presented 
against it. 

Let us see, then, what is the precise point 
at issue. Because the determinist holds that 
nowhere in human conduct can dual possibil- 
ities be formed, one might suppose that the 
libertarian discovers such possibilities every- 
where. But this nobody alleges. All libertar- 
ians agree that a great part of human con- 
duct proceeds exactly as the determinist alleges. 
They only assert that this is not invariably 
the case. To establish freedom it is merely 
necessary to prove that sometimes, or once 



52 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

since the foundation of the world, dual pos- 
sibilities have been narrowed by personal 
agency to a single actual result. This would 
be sufficient to break the bond of causative 
sequence. The question of the extent of free- 
dom and of its existence are two different 
things. Free human actions are asserted to 
have occurred; how frequently, is a matter 
for further consideration. That they do occur 
is maintained on experimental, psychological, 
and social evidence ; and it will assist compar- 
ison of the two opposing doctrines if we 
examine successively how freedom is involved 
in the nature of the person, in that of the 
human mind, and in that of society. 

ii 

As regards the first, libertarians usually de- 
clare that they have immediate experience of 
freedom, each being conscious of it within him- 
self. Every man believes that when conduct is 
most real and unhabitual several possibilities are 
at the moment of action open to him and that 
only in view of them all does he act. I decide 
to sit here, knowing that I might rise, to write 
when I might read, to make the letter h rather 
than a, b or c ; that is, when I go to act I al- 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 53 

ways recognize several courses which I might 
pursue, by a process of deliberation I pass 
them in review, and finally uncompelled adopt 
one to the exclusion of the rest. Decision is the 
cutting off of various possibilities any one of 
which might have been realized. Between a case 
where no such possibilities exist and one where 
they do there is a striking contrast. In the 
former I feel myself free, in the latter bound. 
Of the whole process I have hourly experience 
and am therefore beyond the reach of determ- 
inistic argument. Does any one tell me he has 
searched the wide world over and has come 
upon no instance of freedom? I readily assent 
since only in himself does each of us detect 
anything of the sort. Freedom is a unique 
fact, not outwardly observable. It is found not 
in the f orthgoings of action but in its rise, when 
I issue a mandate that such an act shall occur 
rather than such a one. Were that rather 
cut off, and this be the only act which could 
occur, I should be no actor. I act only in view 
of a rather, perceiving that its lurch in this 
direction or in that awaits my prompting. 

The consciousness expressed in the word 
" rather " sometimes takes on a form of weightier 
import. Instead of inclining to do this rather 



54 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

than that, I may perceive tbat this ought to 
be done. Now "ought" even more authoritat- 
ively than "rather" contemplates more than 
a single line of action. It could not enter the 
head of one who had never known alternative 
possibility. The moment a being becomes 
aware of an "ought" he knows himself to be 
beyond the fixities of character and circum- 
stance. This is the broad foundation of popu- 
lar libertarianism. The belief that two courses 
lie before us and that we can because we ought, 
appears so little open to question that in the 
mind of the ordinary man determinism has 
difficulty in obtaining a hearing. It is apt to 
be passed by as absurd, an academic specula- 
tion for which clever men amuse themselves 
with offering ingenious defense. And certainly 
it must be acknowledged to conflict with some 
of the primary instincts of mankind. 

If, however, freedom is an affair of daily, 
hourly, momentary experience, how can it be 
so frequently denied ? Because of a diversity 
in nature itself. This world of ours contains 
contrasted types of being, things and persons. 
Or, if these terms seem a little occult and some- 
what in need of definition, we may say that 
objects around us are for the most part passive, 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 55 

incapable of originating movement. Energy- 
goes forth from them, it is true, and they are 
in continual motion. But it is transmitted 
motion. Each object receives from something 
else the movement which it manifests. It 
generates nothing and is therefore inactive. 
It merely conveys activity. If then this is the 
character of all observable objects, from what 
source do we obtain the notion of a subject, 
i.e. of an originator of action? Certainly not 
from our fellow men. Looking on them from 
the outside we have no reason to suspect that 
they are not, like all other objects, engaged 
in sending onward motions imparted by some- 
thing else. What leads us to attribute to them 
an active principle? Libertarians are quite 
willing to admit that nothing of the kind is 
externally observed. Every outward change 
can be construed as due to necessitated 
sequence. At only a single point of existence 
— when engaged in conscious purpose — does 
each of us go behind necessity, there watch 
the rise of action, and experience himself as 
no mere transmitter or perceived object, but 
a creative subject. By such subjective acquaint- 
ance with ourselves as beings often active, we 
come to comprehend our fellow men. To them 



56 THE PBOBLEM OF FREEDOM 

also we now attribute a directive power similar 
to our own, and our behavior toward them 
becomes in consequence utterly unlike our 
treatment of things. This fundamental dis- 
tinction between man the passive object and 
man the active subject, the determinist, it is 
alleged, overlooks. Since a large part of our 
life runs on as mechanically as that of things, 
he assumes it all does so, and because personal 
direction cannot be inspected externally like 
other objects, he denies its existence. But we 
must stand by the facts of experience. We 
are immediately conscious of ourselves as 
creatively active, i.e. free. 

ill 

A metaphysical turn is given to this argu- 
ment by Kant. We have seen what aid and 
comfort he <nves to the deterministic cause. 
No less does he give to the libertarian. In my 
last chapter he pointed out that the human 
mind knows its objects only under condition 
of causal sequence. But the self, as we have 
seen, is no mere object. It is a creative subject, 
appealed to by duty, ought, rather, estimates 
of comparative worth. Freedom, therefore, the 
ability to accept or reject among compared 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 57 

alternatives, is involved as a postulate in the 
structure of the human mind. Nor does Kant 
feel his teaching here to be in conflict with 
that previously announced. The mind as a 
passive receiver of perceptions is itself an 
object and all that we observe in it conforms 
to the law of causation. But when practical 
or active it stands outside the flux of causation, 
so becoming free, a fact revealed to us in the 
peculiar consciousness we know as " ought." 
For the same reasons as before I do not elabor- 
ate this contention. But because it has gained 
much fame as the moral or a priori argument 
for freedom, I set it down briefly as a second 
section of the libertarian case. 

IV 

Perhaps before leaving the evidence for 
freedom drawn from immediate consciousness 
I had better mention certain objections to it. 
With its form I am not quite satisfied. It is 
true I quarrel rather with the mode of state- 
ment than with what is asserted, but I think 
we strain the truth when we talk of being 
directly conscious of freedom. I can be con- 
scious only of facts. Now while at the mo- 
ment of choice there are supposedly at least 



58 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

two possibilities open to me, no one of them 
becomes a fact until I have fixed my attention 
on it, selected it, and sent it forth into action. 
Only of what I choose then am I directly 
conscious, not of what I did not choose. No 
doubt I believe that I might have chosen 
something else ; but as the power to do so was 
never exercised, I do not see how I can have 
immediate or positive consciousness of it. I 
should prefer then to put the matter thus : in 
action I must take dual possibilities into account 
and must assume that I am not restricted to 
any one of them. When I choose x I am not 
aware of being obliged to do so, nor can I 
discover anything which shuts me off from 
choosing the seeming possibilities y or z. It 
strikes me as an exaggeration, however, to call 
this an immediate perception. It is a strong 
and probably universal belief, with entire 
absence of evidence to the contrary. For prac- 
tical purposes it amounts to the same as direct 
consciousness. Only as we are trying here to 
think exactly, we must be sure that our 
words do not at any point state more than 
we know. 

A graver objection, however, is that which 
calls the belief itself illusory. It is not de- 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 59 

nied that at the moment of action we seem 
to detect several possibilities, nor that as our 
deed goes forth we figure ourselves as restrict- 
ing these possibilities to a single actual result. 
Such a belief even determinists acknowledge. 
But is it correct? May it not be an illusion? 
Men make mistakes ; large bodies of men make 
the same mistake ; possibly there are instinct- 
ive errors which belong to all mankind. There 
is for example the illusion of motion. Watch- 
ing the sun, I cannot persuade my eye that it 
does not move. I perceive it, directly experi- 
ence it, yet know myself to be deceived. A 
similar deception, it is said, there may be here 
when, going behind action, I feel myself free. 
In both cases a false interpretation is attached 
to an unquestionable fact. 

To this it may be replied that the cases are 
not parallel. We are never shut up to errors 
of sight. In them we can check erroneous 
interpretation by evidence drawn from other 
sources. But no other sources exist by which 
the illusion of freedom can be corrected. It is 
uniquely universal, inevitable. And how will 
inevitable illusion, which admits no possibility 
of being proved illusory, differ from truth? 
" Wen Gott betriigt ist wohl betrogen," says 



60 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

the German proverb ; " cheated by God is 
cheated well." A universal illusion to which all 
mankind must submit and which leads to no 
demonstrable error, is probably itself illusory. 



But after all, many will feel that we have 
thus far been moving over treacherous ground, 
for we have been dealing with subjective evid- 
ence only, evidence which is incommunicable 
and liable to private interpretation. Facts of 
my inner experience may convince me that I 
am free, but I cannot convey the conviction 
to another. From a difficulty of this kind liber- 
tarianism can never wholly escape. In the last 
analysis that doctrine is a summary not of ex- 
ternal observation but of individual conscious- 
ness. If I am free, I am so only for myself. 
Still, certain objective evidence may give con- 
firmation. The belief in freedom is imbedded 
in the structure of society, and thus a con- 
sciousness on the part of the many supple- 
ments and assures individual consciousness. 
To this third, or social, form of the argument 
for freedom I now turn. 

In our intercourse with one another we em- 
ploy certain conceptions and phrases which 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 61 

are unintelligible except on libertarian grounds. 
These conceptions all spring from a common 
root, though its branches are many and their 
appearance diverse. That root is the great 
fact of praise and blame. Men cannot live to- 
gether without approving or disapproving each 
other's conduct; and praise and blame are 
comprehensible, libertarians declare, only on 
the hypothesis of freedom. When I blame 
John for what he has done, I assume that, he 
being he, and circumstances being precisely 
what they were, he might have acted differently. 
Where I do not believe matters could have 
occurred otherwise, even though I feel them 
annoying, I do not regard them as deserving 
blame. If an apple bumps my head in falling 
from a tree, I am pained, annoyed, angry even, 
but I do not blame the apple. The child does. 
He is unacquainted with the laws of fixed cau- 
sal sequence, but familiar with those of his own 
free action. By these latter something is picked 
out to occur from the many events which 
might have happened ; and the child, little ac- 
quainted with the nature of external motions, 
carries directly over to the outer world that 
selective causal agency which he experiences 
every hour in himself. Naturally, therefore, he 



62 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

blames the apple for his smart. We, out of 
our broader knowledge, try to make him see 
that what has happened is a misfortune but 
not a fault. When he says "naughty apple," 
we explain that the apple was not responsible, 
exhibited no malice or guilt, and could not 
have done differently. Expressions of blame 
and praise, suitable enough where freedom is 
and where selection is continually going on, 
have no place in a rigid world. A determinist 
is inconsistent who thanks his friend for a 
Christmas gift. 

It may, however, be felt that this is largely 
true and that praise and blame had better 
have less part in human affairs. Undoubt- 
edly we employ them too loosely. About 
the springs of each other's actions we know 
little. What influences of evironment, of train- 
ing, of habit, of heredity, had a share with 
intention in bringing about the behavior that 
offends us, we can only guess. It seems pre- 
sumptuous to pick out a certain tract of con- 
duct from a connected life and declare that it 
meets with our approval or disapproval. Why 
not take things as they happen ? 

" Why should I feel another man's mistakes 
More than his sicknesses or poverty ? " 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 63 

But we cannot discharge moral judgment 
so easily. Estimates of worth are, for good or 
ill, deeply inwrought in all human intercourse. 
To abolish them would call for a fundamental 
reconstruction of society ; when it was accom- 
plished, all sense of a difference between good 
and bad conduct would have disappeared. 
But these are notions that cling, cling so close 
and are so significant that we even apply them 
where they do not belong. It is hard for ex- 
ample not to think the rat reprehensible that 
gnaws our shoes, the mosquito that stings our 
flesh, or the ivy that poisons our hand. Shall 
we ever be brought to reckon drunkenness as 
no more discreditable than sobriety, theft than 
generosity ? I doubt it and believe that we shall 
loDg retain ideals of conduct to which waver- 
ing mortals will be summoned to conform. 

This at least is the view of the law ; for the 
rewards and punishments of civil society are 
only a special form of praise and blame. We 
punish the criminal because we believe him to 
be a wrongdoer and hold that he was not in- 
capable of doing the right. We do not punish 
the things around us, nor ordinarily our ani- 
mals, so doubtful are we whether dual possi- 
bilities are open to them. Much in their con- 



64 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

duct suggests that they too may be free ; and 
just so far as we suspect it, we give them the 
same praise and blame that we give one an- 
other. " Bad dog, you ought not to have done 
that; you knew better." So I address my poor 
relative, honoring him by bringing him into 
my blamable society. Of course I am not sure 
that the dog distinguishes right and wrong, 
and I easily ad mit that my words may be in- 
appropriate. It is only in the case of my fel- 
low man that I feel secure of having a proper 
subject for blame. For while even here I can- 
not assess nice degrees nor tell precisely how 
culpable one was in his evil deed, I feel that 
I should degrade him by assuming that he was 
shut up to the single act which he performed. 
But praise and blame are not given to 
other persons only ; I praise and blame my- 
self. This sort of praise is known as self- 
respect, dignity, pride; this blame, as shame, 
regret, remorse. To the determinist, regret 
can be only a consciousness of unavoidable 
damage. The libertarian's anguish is rooted in 
the conviction that the harm need not have 
been wrought. 

" I might, unhappy word ! O me, I might ! 
Yet to myself myself did give the blow ! " 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 65 

This is the language of regret. It contains, 
over and above its sorrow, the knowledge o£ 
an unused opportunity. This distinctive qual- 
ity of regret, lending it a poignancy unfelt 
in other pains, we have all experienced. We 
know how unlike it is to the mere sense of 
damage into which deterministic explanations 
would resolve it; and the universal conscious- 
ness of it has therefore always been a strong 
point in the libertarian case. Undoubtedly 
our regrets are often mistaken, we imagining 
that something need not have been done 
which — since we were we and circumstances 
such — we could not help doing. But unless 
we are prepared again to accept a universal 
illusion, there must be cases where we are 
not deceived. Already we have seen how in 
the moment of action all men believe in alter- 
native possibilities. In regret this belief re- 
mains after the action has passed and when 
we look back on it from a cool moment. Upon 
full survey I blame myself for having done 
something, convinced that I might have done 
otherwise. This, according to the determinist, 
is an error. One should never regret. Taking 
everything into account, nothing else can 
happen than that which does happen. Regret 



66 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

is therefore meaningless. Yet the determinist 
should see that he cannot assert this to be so 
without using the conception he denounces 
and falling into contradiction with himself. 
Does he blame regret ? By that condemnation 
he assumes that in this instance at least an- 
other possibility existed than that which be- 
came actual. If there was a dual possibility 
here, why not elsewhere? 

Praise and blame then — with their attend- 
ing conceptions of guilt, merit, responsibility, 
regret, punishment, and their implication of 
alternative choice — cannot be banished. The 
very effort to banish reinstates them. Here 
accordingly, in the impress which these have 
given to the institutions and habits of society 
our individual consciousness of freedom trains 
strong objective confirmation. But to these 
considerations what explanation does the de- 
terminist offer? He is no stranger to social 
institutions and habits. He adopts them, and 
in his own case sees the prodigious import- 
ance of praise and blame, rewards and pun- 
ishments. Yet while employing, he gives 
them a peculiar significance. Let us see if we 
can seize it. 

I am driving this morning. My horse goes 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 67 

slowly. He may be tired from his travels of 
yesterday. But it is important for me to reach 
a given point at a definite time. Under pres- 
ent conditions my horse can go no faster. To 
secure speed something must be added. I add 
the lash. Plus that sting the horse will go 
well enough. Observing his slow pace, I do 
not count him culpable, as if he had willfully 
rejected a different rate of movement. I see 
that the causes of motion are insufficient and 
so increase them. Something similar occurs in 
human society. A man is about to break into 
a bank. Considering his famished condition, 
his heritage, his education, his habits of life, 
his need of money and the difficulty of ob- 
taining it elsewhere, there is only one issue 
open to him. Into the bank he will go. The 
law with its penalties comes to hi§jaid, fur- 
nishing just that supplemental motive which 
will hold him on the sidewalk. Punishment 
is then a humane contrivance for the protec- 
tion of society and the reform of the crimi- 
nal. It is not concerned with retaliation, 
We cannot by observing the evil done determ- 
ine the turpitude of the doer and assign 
appropriate pains. The assessment of guilt 
lies outside our province. When we punish, 



68 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

we do so in order to put obstacles in the way 
of unsocial actions. The function of blame 
is found in its deterring power. 

This explanation will be satisfactory or the 
reverse according to the direction in which 
we believe praise and blame to look. Do they 
regard the future or the past? When John 
has done me a kindness, I thank him for it, 
praising his action as excellent. Am I in such 
praises contemplating the future, easing his 
way to what he shall hereafter do; or am I 
thinking of what he has already done and 
trying to indicate the quality of that past? 
Evidently I may do either. Gratitude has 
been defined as " a lively expectation of 
favors to come." We often praise children in 
order to stimulate them to repeat their good 
deeds. Praise is a valuable impulse and cer- 
tainly does again and again regard future con- 
duct. But I hardly think any persons able to 
read their own minds will believe this to be 
its exclusive office. Praise and blame are pri- 
marily assessive of past quality and are be- 
stowed only where we suppose the action 
performed was chosen rather than some pos- 
sible other. It is on this "rather" that our 
attention fastens. I thank my friend for his 



THE PROBABILITY OF FREEDOM 69 

Christmas gift, mindful of the fact that he 
need not have given it, not because I remem- 
her that Christmas comes again next year. I 
blame my clerk's negligence, knowing, it is 
true, that if passed by it will be persisted 
in; but also wishing to make him ashamed 
that in the given instance he did not take an 
energetic course. The sense of avoidable 
wrong is central in the minds of both blamer 
and blamed; the aim at future correction is 
but collateral. 

Yet though moral blame primarily regards 
the past, less and less does civil punishment 
do so. Its aim in our day is for the most part 
corrective and protective, just that which the 
determinist would have all disapproval be. In 
times less civilized retaliation was prominent 
in the law. Penal reform has chiefly consisted 
in reducing this prominence and in punishing 
orlenders only in ways wmcn may /save both 
the criminal and the community from further 
harm. In my judgment this is a wise change. 
The law is at best a clumsy contrivance, deal- 
ing with men in the aggregate rather than 
with individuals, and therefore little fitted 
to estimate gradations of guilt. But merely 
because the law's rough working properly 



70 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

confines itself to an external and mechanical 
reckoning of conduct, we are not to suppose 
moral guilt absent and the evil inevitable. 
Justly, I think, does the libertarian insist that 
in private life we employ praise and blame in 
a far more fundamental way. Our feeling of 
shame over our own bad deeds, our feeling 
of reverence for the good ones of others, point 
to a kind of excellence unknown to natural 
law nor fully recognized in laws of the state. 
Such then is the libertarian argument, 
which appears to me on the whole sound and 
conclusive. Its full strength, however, does 
not even yet appear. Although in this chap- 
ter I have often suggested the reply which a 
determinist might make to libertarian claims, 
I have not stated how the libertarian regards 
the important considerations adduced by de- 
terminism. With this attempted rebuttal I 
open the following chapter. Only after exam- 
ining it can we decide whether, as he asserts, 
the libertarian sees all that the determinist 
sees, and something more. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 
I 

The first section of the deterministic argu- 
ment sought to prove that nowhere in the ex- 
ternal world can freedom be found. We never 
come upon a case where we must assume its 
presence. Observed results can always be ex- 
plained by other means. But this the libertar- 
ian no longer denies. Early libertarianism, it 
is true, thought to graft its freedom into a 
world which at points is vacant of causal se- 
quence. But science long ago demonstrated 
that no such points exist. The modern libertar- 
ian perceives that breaks in the framework of 
things are not required for his purpose. He 
holds that we find freedom only within our 
own breasts, each person being conscious of it 
for himself alone. In the outer world we never 
directly envisage action. Thus we see merely 
its results. But since it is the origin of action 
with which freedom deals, and this is experi- 
enced solely by each for himself, it is only 



72 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

through his own actions that any one comes 
to acquaintance with freedom. Over this first 
experimental evidence there is therefore little 
controversy. The state of things alleged by 
determinists is now generally acknowledged. 
Here genuine progress has been made in the 
ancient controversy and the field common to 
both parties has been permanently enlarged. 
So habitual has this common temper of mind 
become that an occasional departure from it 
strikes us as comic. I cut the following from 
the daily newspaper : — 

" God prevents the transmission of disease 
through the use of the common communion cup," 
declared Bishop C. C. Grafton, of Fond du Lac, 
when he commented upon the action of the State 
Board of Health in exempting churches from the 
operation of the rule against the use of the common 
drinking-cup. 

44 The good Lord," he said, " would not permit 
the transmission of disease to any of the worship- 
ers through the means of their worship of Him." 

For the most part, however, in our time the 
libertarian no less than the determinist inhabits 
a world linked by ties of causation. These ties 
he finds also in the inner world, so far as 
this can be made a passive object of observa- 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 73 

tion. Only when initiating action does he come 
upon freedom, when viewing himself not as an 
object but as a subject. Over the whole obser- 
vational field the libertarian admits the determ- 
inistic contention and declares that it does 
not make against his own creed. 

In a similar way he has no quarrel with one 
portion of the second or a priori argument. 
He readily accepts the Kantian doctrine of 
causation as a fixed condition of cognitive 
thought, but he follows too the lead of Kant 
in distinguishing sharply the field of passive 
apprehension, ruled by sequence, from that of 
creative activity where freedom appears. And 
if any one chooses to call those beliefs illu- 
sory which like freedom have their origin in 
necessities of the human mind, he would merely 
remark that no species of truth is known un- 
colored by such illusions. On this Kantian 
doctrine and on that first section of the de- 
terministic case, where emphasis is laid on the 
prevalence of law, there is little room for con- 
test. While there may be individual differ- 
ences of interpretation, the two contrasted 
lines of thought are here in substantial accord. 



74 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

II 

Dissent begins as we turn to the nature of 
the self or ego. This the determinist would 
dissolve into a series of conscious states, and 
even bid us not to take too seriously the idea 
of series. In reality there is no unity-giving 
thread running through the many sequences. 
They are but a lot or manifold, each tied by 
the tail to something preceding. Such a view 
belongs naturally to determinism and is indeed 
hardly to be avoided by it. For if a central 
consciousness is to have no part in shaping 
action, why should it not disappear? If it re- 
mained it would be contemplative only. As 
active beings, we should have no use for it. 
Libertarians on the contrary, while not assert- 
ing a detached existence for the ego, believe 
that each of us possesses a consciousness of 
organic wholeness and has a genuine individ- 
uality capable of reacting on special experien- 
ces and shaping them to its advantage. If 
asked to explain this ego and state what its 
directive power is like, they frankly say they 
cannot. It is like nothing else. As well might 
one ask an ultimate analysis of space or time. 
Descriptions of the functions and peculiarities 



THE BEPLY TO DETERMINISM 75 

of all three are possible enough, but neither 
can be resolved into anything more elementary 
than itself. Being employed each instant of 
our lives as conditions of apprehending all 
else, they cannot themselves be separately ap- 
prehended. Nor on the same account can 
they be dispensed with. He who attempts to 
deny a personal self really implies its existence 
in the very denial. Experience involves an 
experiencer. We cannot say we are aware only 
of mental states without introducing somebody 
who is aware and setting up a doctrine of per- 
sonality the very opposite of that which is 
asserted. It is wise to bring out into open 
consciousness what in any case we use. And 
since in considering human life we cannot 
escape thinking of something more than the 
passing show of mental states, it is evasive to 
call these real and that "something more" 
unreal. I count it an advantage for libertarians 
that they deal frankly with the self and insist 
on its importance. 

in 

The third argument for determinism, based 
on the predictability of conduct, looks formid- 
able. In the same way as we predict events in 



76 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

the physical world, Hume tells us, we can pre- 
dict the behavior o£ our fellow men. I forecast 
my friend's act as I do the weather. Of course 
I am far from sure what that weather will be. 
Looking in the paper for increased certainty, 
I am often led still further astray. Unobserved 
conditions often falsify our calculation. But 
never on that account do we imagine that no 
cause exists for a fair day or foul, that the 
weather is a matter of chance and the world 
a free world, inherently endowed with an am- 
biguous future. Nor should we, frequently as 
we fail to predict one another's conduct, there- 
fore infer that man is an incalculable being. 
Tet is not this just what the libertarian asserts? 
Claiming an ambiguous future for each of us, 
must he not maintain that the prediction of 
human conduct is impossible, either for our- 
selves or for the Almighty ? If it is left to the 
individual in the moment of action freely to 
fix one of several possibilities, how will a lib- 
ertarian explain the generally observed predict- 
ability of conduct? Will he deny it? Far 
from it. He, too, hardly less than the determ- 
inist, recognizes it as essential if men will 
work together, and here is his explanation of 
its occurrence. 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 77 

Obviously no one is completely personal. To 
a large extent each o£ us is as truly a thing 
as the objects around. We all have bodies, 
bodies subject to the same laws as other ani- 
mals, and much of our mental action is of the 
same type as theirs. Mechanism enters largely 
into the conduct of us all. In a previous chap- 
ter I have pointed out that no libertarian as- 
serts that all conduct expresses freedom. Many 
believe that comparatively seldom do we defin- 
itely choose. The great body of action runs 
off from us without conscious guidance and in 
as mechanical a fashion as any other species 
of motion. All that the libertarian asserts is 
that at times something creative occurs. We 
initiate a new line of action which was not 
provided for in the past, initiate it without 
compulsion and with more than a single issue 
before us. Nobody regards this as true of the 
great body of our acts. In reference to these, 
therefore, prediction is as possible as if there 
were no such thing as freedom. 

But the modern libertarian accepts still more 
of the deterministic creed. As we form our 
characters, we increase the possibility of pre- 
diction. What the need and method of such 
character formation is, this paragraph will 



78 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

explain. By character we mean any established 
mode of feeling, willing, or thinking. Finding 
myself in some situation for the first time, I 
notice that there are several possibilities before 
me. I accordingly deliberate, examining what 
effect each will have if I choose it. Suppose 
I decide that I shall gain most of what I seek 
by selecting x rather than y or z. Half an 
hour hence I am in the same situation once 
more. Shall I repeat the former deliberation, 
resurveying the various possibilities and again 
come to my old decision? Certainly not. If 
the decision was a wise one then, the process 
of reaching it may now be shortened. As soon 
as the situation arises a second time, the sight 
of it may be a prompter, suggestive of what 
had better take place. To this suggestion 
I may yield. I need not examine y and z 
again, but simply let x occur. After it has 
occurred twice, it will run off more promptly 
a third time; and promptness is often a mat- 
ter of importance. Were we obliged in each 
instance to deliberate afresh, the scope of our 
power would be enormously reduced. Accord- 
ingly the wise man accumulates habits. Delib- 
erating coolly in a novel situation and making 
up his mind critically as regards his best mode 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 79 

of action, he then mechanizes his conduct 
according to a pattern, discharging conscious- 
ness from immediate control. Each of us be- 
comes strong about in proportion to the tracts 
of life thus mechanized ; for as soon as our 
petty acts can be trusted to take care of them- 
selves, conscious choice is set free to busy it- 
self with broader issues. Thus indirectly, by 
the employment of associative suggestion and 
reflex action, we immensely extend the scope 
of our control. Freedom is now concerned 
with ultimate ends, the detail of means being 
abandoned to habit. That is the name we give 
to each associated train, character being the 
total bundle of such habits. 

Now the libertarian is by no means a foe to 
habit. In the interest of the largest freedom, 
he even encourages its formation. Seeing how 
wasteful it is in the common concerns of life 
to be watching a multitude of possible issues, 
he would cut them down in each case to a 
single approved result. We might then say 
that the sagacious libertarian, while recogniz- 
ing freedom as a valuable endowment, will 
daily try to lessen the occasions of its exercise. 
We are apt to picture freedom as something 
precious and are childishly anxious to prevent 



' 80 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

its slipping away. But if it is to be service- 
able, we must rid ourselves of much of it and 
stiffen what remains with a large element of 
determinism. However much of a libertarian 
I am, I do not decide each morning whether 
I will wear clothes. My parents decided this 
for me when I was born, and I confirmed 
/ their choice as soon as I was capable of dress- 
ing. Since that date I have been happily rid 
of freedom on this point and have known but 
a single issue as regards clothing. My hind 
of dress, my general style, perhaps even the 
tailor whom I shall patronize, have all in vary- 
ing degrees been similarly settled. In short, 
by the time I am mature a large part of my 
life has been broken up into tracts, the proper 
mode of conduct within each determined, and 
an appropriate habit with its single issue has 
me in charge. From these beaten paths free- 
dom is banished, reserved for service in re- 
gions less familiar. Nor could I escape a nar- 
row outlook in any other way. 

Evidently then within this field conduct is 
easily predictable, predictable indeed just in 
proportion as we become mature. In my former 
illustration of the chess player, the successful 
prediction of my move indicated that I had 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 81 

acquired a chess character and had ceased to 
be a novice. To be predicted was therefore 
agreeable. We saw too how one often resents 
uncertainty in regard to his behavior, saying 
that if we had studied his character we should 
know how he would act. Fixities of action are 
a part of the goal of freedom, exactly that 
which it seeks ultimately to reach. Without 
them a man is hardly a person at all. The 
libertarian therefore finds nothing subversive 
of his doctrine in the fact that in the usual 
situations of life we are able to form intellig- 
ent guesses in regard to one another's doings. 
Of course we can, wherever men are grown 
up. We may not know all the conditions in- 
volved and so may fall into occasional errors. 
The man himself may not have learned how 
largely his freedom depends on his consolidat- 
ing types of conduct into character and so 
he may leave us uncertain. But most of us 
early detect the importance of habit in con- 
siderable sections of our lives and so become 
in a fair degree dependable. 

IV 

But there is one curious circumstance in re- 
gard to predictability, often passed unnoticed 



82 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

and not easy for the determinist to explain. 
It is this. If conduct is predictable in propor- 
tion to knowledge and has no reference to any 
freedom involved in the formation of character, 
then we should be likely to predict our own 
conduct with extreme certainty though doubt- 
ful about that of those around. Yet something 
like the reverse of this is the fact. Let any 
one scrutinize himself without prejudice and 
say if it is not so. I have hitherto been an up- 
right man. I have never stolen, am not in the 
habit of telling lies, getting drunk, or toying 
with vice. My neighbors say I shall never do 
such things, and they expect clean conduct of 
me as a matter of course. But am I myself so 
sure ? Holy men have acknowledged that they 
never saw a criminal without saying to them- 
selves, " How easily might I be like him ! " 
They detect in themselves possibilities hidden 
from others, and the knowledge of these makes 
them feel insecure. A striking case is recorded 
in the Gospel narrative. At the Last Supper 
when Jesus says, " One of you shall betray 
me," each of the disciples questions whether it 
may not be he. Unable to predict they turn 
to Jesus, thinking that an outsider may per- 
haps be better able to decide than themselves. 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 83 

Even in non-moral matters our uncertainty 
about our own future is different in kind, and 
not merely in degree from that which we have 
when estimating another's. My friend's de- 
parture for Europe next year may seem cal- 
culable while my own, though announced and 
intended, is open to changes of mind. To us 
insiders the fixities of character appear not so 
fixed as they do to outsiders. Rarely does a 
depraved person believe he could not reform, 
or a righteous man that he might not fall. All 
this seems incompatible with the deterministic 
account. Under that teaching certitude of pre- 
diction is in proportion to the degree of know- 
ledge. But here, increased knowledge breeds 
a peculiar doubt. There is some disturbing 
factor here. The libertarian may well attribute 
this disturbing doubt to the knowledge of al- 
ternative possibilities in our own case, acknow- 
ledge inaccessible to us in the case of another. 
When we have once observed this strange 
difference between the calculation of our own 
future acts and those of our neighbor, we shall 
be prepared, I think, to notice a still wider 
difference in our certainty of causal sequence 
as exhibited by physical and human events. In 
the brilliant passage quoted on page thirty-nine, 



84 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

Hume attempted to identify the two. "In 
musing over a connected chain of natural 
causes and physical events the mind feels no 
difference between them." A prisoner regards 
the "inflexibility " of his jailer as like in kind to 
that of the stone and iron of his prison. They 
are of the same nature and derived from the 
same principles. But are they? I wish my 
reader would turn back and reread the pas- 
sage. I think he will see that Hume's zeal for 
a special doctrine has led him to overlook the 
psychologic facts. As often happens with him, 
he is more intent on fashioning handsome 
sentences than on exploring the intricacies of 
human nature. Let us grant that in certain 
cases our assurance of what men will do may 
mount to a degree equal to that with which 
we anticipate a physical event, still its "na- 
ture" is unlike. It "feels" different, and our 
expectation of the occurrence is not " derived 
from the same principles." The possibility of 
alternative choice is rarely left altogether out 
of account. 

It would seem then that the predictability 
of conduct, on which determinism mainly re- 
lies, can be explained as well or better on lib- 
ertarian grounds. But it has sometimes been 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 85 

urged that the certitude here must after all be 
of substantially the same type as that which 
we observe in nature because, like that, it can 
be reduced to a quantitive expression. When 
mathematics enters freedom would seem in- 
vited to withdraw. Now the most capricious 
human actions can be mathematically forecast. 
Statisticians can tell with considerable cer- 
tainty about how many marriages and suicides 
will occur in Massachusetts the coming year. 
These acts strike us as typically personal, as 
cases of conduct where our freedom, if any 
exists, would certainly operate. Probably we 
imagine that the impulse which starts our ex- 
travagant act was decreed by us at the in- 
stant ; but the statistician with his tables is 
upon us and shows how all was settled a year 
ago. We were predestined to marry at just 
that time. Does not this fact then settle the 
case of libertarianism ? The acknowledged 
power of prediction is due, according to the 
libertarian, to our disposition freely to form 
habits of conduct and to have these follow 
lines of a single, instead of a double, issue. 
Yet does not the fact that our actions submit 
to a quantitative formulation show that the 
possibilities contained in them are really as 



86 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

single as those of the measurable world else- 
/where ? 

1 do not think so, and I am surprised to 
find that some people do. The only way I can 
account for the impressiveness of this flimsy 
argument is by remembering that the appear- 
ance of mathematics in any controversy is apt 
to brow-beat the non-mathematical mind and 
induce it to surrender whatever is asked, even 
freedom itself. If mathematics is only a form 
of language, without power of its own, what 
is said in it has no more cogency, but only 
occasionally greater clearness, than if uttered 
otherwise. In this case we inquire about the 
causes of certain facts. The statistician registers 
those facts, but is not concerned with their 
causes. Assume that his lists have causal sig- 
nificance, and they straightway become ridicu- 
lous. For example, I am about to marry, but 
looking over the statistical table I find it full 
and am prevented. Or, I had no thought of 
suicide but happening to pick up one of these 
calculations and noticing that one person is 
still lacking, I feel myself summoned. Could 
anything be more nonsensical? It is all a 
confusion of mind. What is asserted is that, 
whether there are alternative possibilities or 



THE BEPLY TO DETEBMINISM 87 

not, men have acted in the past and may be 
expected to act in the future about in the 
manner described. On this point there is no 
dispute. But in it there is nothing to exclude 
individual initiative. Mathematics may here 
be tabulating the effects of compulsory causa- 
tion, of free choice, or of absolute chance. 
Nothing indicates which. To assume that it 
must be compulsory causation is to beg the 
point at issue. This is not then an argument 
at all, and I did not think it fair to determinism 
to include it in my second chapter, among the 
grave matters enumerated there which really 
require explanation before a doctrine of free- 
dom can be held. It is only one of three 
question-begging statements of determinism 
which require attention here. 

The second of these has had the widest 
currency and is still often heard in popular 
presentations of the deterministic case. It runs 
substantially as follows : since we always choose 
according to the strongest motive, there can 
never be more than a single issue open to us. 
For of two motives it will always be true either 
that one is the stronger or that the two are of 
equal strength. In the latter case no action 
ensues. Wherever action does appear, it is the 



88 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

only act which under the circumstances was 
possible, for we are totally unable by any act 
to transform a weaker motive into a stronger. 
This "strongest motive' ' was formerly one of 
the doughtiest combatants of the deterministic 
camp. Libertarians always declared there was 
no blood in him, but only lately have they con- 
vinced their opponents that such is the fact. 
The impostor has now been silently dropped 
and rather rarely presents himself on the field. 
But what has been turned out of the scientific 
army still leads a vagrant life about the streets, 
and probably a good many years will pass before 
the last is heard of this curious circular phrase. 
To call it untrue or true would be equally mis- 
taken, for it has in reality no meaning at all. 
How do we know a motive to be the strongest? 
By seeing action ensue. Have we any inde- 
pendent means of testing its strength ? None. 
Then in saying that the will follows the strong- 
est motive we have merely declared that what- 
ever precedes precedes. Such a statement, 
while unquestionable, advances knowledge not 
a whit. We have said nothing, yet are in dan- 
ger of begging the question to be discussed. 
For what probably leads us to utter anything 
so feeble is the assumption, covertly con- 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 89 

tained in the words "strong" or "strongest," 
that ethics must be like physics and have ante- 
cedents of the same kind. That is what is de- 
nied by libertarians. They may be wrong, but 
they must be proved to be so by evidence 
and not by assumption. In the greater clarity 
of to-day, and in the greater desire to under- 
stand opinions from which they differ, scholars 
have pretty generally given up talking about 
" the strongest motive." 

The third of these curious circular state- 
ments is contained in a name sometimes gdven 
to libertarianism. Recently it has been often 
called indeterminism, thus implying that liber- 
tarians in general suppose volition to proceed 
without motive, preference, or ground. Some 
of them undoubtedly do. Under the heading 
of the liberty of indifference I shall hereafter 
explain their doctrine and show it to be prac- 
tically equivalent to extreme necessarianism. 
But whether my judgment of the theory is 
correct or not, it is evidently unfair to identify 
all libertarians with a peculiarly vulnerable 
section of them, and when this little body is 
discredited to assume that libertarianism as a 
whole is overthrown. It is well to understand 
an opponent before vanquishing him. 



90 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

Here then is presented the full case of both 
libertarian and determinist. Each has presented 
his positive doctrine and has also stated what- 
ever he has to urge by way of rebuttal. The 
amount of this latter on the deterministic side 
being small, has been given in connection with 
the libertarian evidence. But while determin- 
ists have usually been inclined to make short 
work of the belief in freedom, to call it a 
delusion and pass on, libertarians have entered 
pretty minutely into the deterministic teaching 
and have taken pains to show with what parts 
of it they could or could not agree. For the 
sake of clearness I have therefore separated 
their rebuttal from their positive doctrine 
and have dedicated to the latter this entire 
chapter. 

Hitherto our aim has been not assessment 
but comprehension, and both sides of the case 
have been presented as strongly as possible. 
But fairness does not necessitate absence of 
conviction. Wherever comparison occurs, judg- 
ment should follow. If we avoid it outwardly, 
it almost inevitably goes on within. I have 
no desire to avoid it. To my mind the liber- 
tarian takes into account a larger body of 
facts than the determinist. When I ask which 



THE REPLY TO DETERMINISM 91 

of two sides in a discussion is more true, this 
is what I always mean : which is the more in- 
clusive, which one has seen all that the other 
sees and something more besides ? Now I find 
that the libertarian is usually the better listener. 
With pretty much everything that is in the 
determinist's mind he reckons, but the determ- 
inist is blind to many facts of ordinary life 
which are taken into account by the libertarian. 
Consequently if I were compelled to choose 
between the two cases as they here stand, I 
suppose I should rank myself as a libertarian. 
But am I so compelled? Has the libertarian 
adopted everything of worth in the determin- 
istic creed? As unprejudiced students, we 
need not tie ourselves to one or the other. 
We seek the entire truth, wherever found. 
We must acknowledge that the world has 
never been able to get along without determ- 
inists. Narrow as we must often judge them, 
they have been the guardians of certain truths 
weighty for mankind. It is they who have 
been loyal to law, order, and causation, while 
libertarians have been defending life, spon- 
taneity and progress. We need both. In cases 
where reason seems thus arrayed against itself 
it is usually well to inquire whether theappar- 



92 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

ent conflict may not spring from some am- 
biguity in a term. That term cannot be freedom . 
This we defined with great precision, and to 
the meaning established in the first chapter 
we have held rigidly throughout. But have we 
as clearly fixed the meaning of causation? 
Have we not assumed that we know all about 
this ? Such assumptions are the danger spots 
of thought. What we assume without criticism 
is apt to lead us astray. I believe, therefore, 
we ought to pause here and get a clearer view 
of causation if we will formulate a doctrine 
which shall not neglect important facts of 
choice. 



CHAPTER V 

KINDS OF CAUSATION 

I 

For analyzing causation so as to discover 
whether there may not be different kinds, and 
we be using the term in a confusing variety 
of senses, I will take as clear and familiar an 
instance of it as I can find and trace the work- 
ing of the principle in detail. The instance 
chosen is one which I have already found 
serviceable in my Field of Ethics. 

Here is a railroad track on which an engine 
runs. Behind the engine runs a car. What 
makes the car run ? The engine, we say, and 
this is the process : in the beginning the steam, 
expanded by heat, enters the piston-box ; not 
finding room for itself there, it presses against 
a valve and piston, obliging the two to move ; 
as they move the steam escapes, and the piston 
is drawn back. These two motions of the 
piston, conveyed by it to the driving-wheels, 
force them to turn ; and they, revolving, carry 
forward the truck and the engine resting upon 



94 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

it. The engine, now in motion, is connected 
with the car by a bolt which conveys a tug to 
one end of an iron loop. The other end of the 
loop and a second bolt soon feel the impulse 
and, being inseparable from the car, carry it 
forward also. Such, in brief, is the chain of 
connected causes by which the force of expand- 
ing steam is transmitted to the engine and 
finally to the pursuing car. 

Now the one invariable fact which deserves 
notice in this continuous series is that before 
an effect occurs its cause must already be 
present. Before the car can move, a tug must 
come upon the link connecting it with the 
engine ; before the link can receive that tug, 
the engine must be in motion; before the 
engine moves, steam must be generated and 
the piston driven. In short causation is sequen- 
tial. Throughout the whole train causes are 
first realized, then their effects follow. Out of 
the motion which has been comes that which 
at any moment will be. We rightly call such 
causes antecedents ; for lying in the past, they 
dictate the future. 

Extend the illustration and suppose a man 
running after the car. What makes him run ? 
Asked what made the car run, we said it was 



KINDS OF CAUSATION 95 

the engine. When we now ask what makes 
the man run, shall we not say it is the car ? 
That is his antecedent, as the engine was that 
of the car. But the two cases are not quite 
parallel. The causal operation of the car differs 
from that of the engine. Not merely is its in- 
fluence transmitted through sight and mind, 
instead of through links and pistons, but there 
appear in the man curious imaginative anti- 
cipations of what may be which transform the 
influence received from the car into an alto- 
gether novel kind of causation. The car's 
motion was induced by a past fact, the man's 
by a future possibility. What made the car 
run was a state of things already existing in 
the engine. The forces there had to have actual 
existence before the car would stir. What 
moved the man was the bare possibility of 
being on the car. As a fact, he was not on 
the car. Had he been, he would not have run. 
The cause that is working on him lies ahead, 
it is an affair of to be ; that which works on 
the car lies behind, it is an affair of has been. 
Nor is this case exceptional. The causes 
which operate personally are never in existence. 
They are unrealized, imaginary causes, mere 
future possibilities. Yet out of that futurity 



96 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

comes an impelling influence. The man's 
action is no less truly caused than was the car's. 
But the nature of the two sets of causes is 
utterly dissimilar. In the one case while the 
cause was of the past, its effect is in the pre- 
sent. In the other, the cause is of the future 
and will only manifest itself at the end of a 
long series of antecedent effects. If the man 
is quick enough, he will catch that car, climb 
upon it, and secure a seat. Then at last the 
cause of the whole process will be complete 
and evident. The cause of the car's movement 
lay complete at the beginning. 

ii 

The difference between these two processes 
and between the laws which express them, is 
so momentous that I am inclined to coin for 
them two technical terms which shall precisely 
mark out for each its way of working. That 
which moves from reality to reality — from ac- 
tual A to B, then from actual B to (7, then from 
actual C to D — I would call sequential causa- 
tion. But that which, starting with possible 
D, summons actual C, B and A to coordinate 
themselves with reference to it, I call antese- 
quential causation ; and I do not much care 



KINDS OF CAUSATION 97 

whether the first half of the compound is 
spelled with a final i or e. Spelled with an e, 
it would declare how all personal, moral, pur- 
posive causation comes out of a future. Spelled 
with an i it would indicate how by doing so 
it completely reverses the order of physical, 
mechanical, inert causation. Things, objects, 
the world without us, even the mechanical 
and habitual world within, are all subject to 
sequential causation. But at certain times of 
one's life, at least in those sections of his na- 
ture which are not yet fixed, a person may be 
subject to a kind of causation of a different 
type — antesequential causation. 

But if I am right in believing that there 
are two broadly contrasted types of causation, 
the world at large can hardly have missed 
them. Affecting our lives so directly as they 
do, it is improbable that mankind has waited 
for me to keep the two apart. By what terms 
then is the contrast marked in ordinary speech ? 
By a multitude of phrases, each presenting 
some special feature of the antithesis. I will 
give a brief list, including in it only the 
more important pairs : (1) We speak of effi- 
cient and final causation, that which operates 
where it stands, and that which proceeds a fine. 



98 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

from the end. I have shown how in the latter 
case the cause conies to light only when the 
last link of the line is attained. Suitably, 
therefore, the whole process is called final 
causation. (2) Mechanical or physical, and 
moral or rational causation, is that which is 
distinctive respectively of things and of per- 
sons. (3) Positive and ideal, indicates that in 
the one case the cause is an established fact, 
in the other the representation of a future 
possibility. (4) The terms passive and active 
causation are sometimes employed when we 
wish to show how in the first instance motion 
is merely transmitted, but in the second ini- 
tiated. (5) Kant has proposed heteronomy 
and autonomy, in order to mark the contrast 
which I had in mind in my earlier phrases 
a alien interference " and " self guidance for 
interests of our own." (6) Forces and ends, 
coercion and inducement, compulsion and 
persuasion, and — a pair of terms which charac- 
terize the whole system of the world — mechan- 
ism and teleology, all set forth the fundamental 
contrast in the types of linkage, around and 
within us. Everything is linked with every- 
thing, no part of the world, physical or men- 
tal, being detached. Only where personal life 



KINDS OF CAUSATION 99 

is most distinctly manifested that linkage is 
managed in a way unlike that of other things. 
Now all these terms, being taken from the 
lips of emotional men, are inexact and often 
bear about them some disturbing association. 
In an investigation which seeks to advance 
without predjudice I have thought that a 
fresh pair of terms, carefully defined, might 
best hold our minds to the required point. 
And I believe much clarity is gained by mak- 
ing the question of the time of causation the 
central feature of the discussion. 

in 

Antesequential causation is then preemin- 
ently the personal kind. But what has been said 
previously must qualify this. Most of our do- 
ings are, either by design or carelessness, as 
mechanically guided as any events of the 
physical world. While purposive causation 
is possible for none but ourselves, we do not 
always exercise it. Some men go through 
life in unresisting acceptance of whatever 
impulses play upon them. Others wisely 
turn over their ordinary actions to mechan- 
ized habit, thereby securing free attention 
for higher ends. There remains therefore, even 



100 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

in the most intentional of men, only a narrow 
margin directly subjected to antesequential 
causation. But through that margin all the 
rest of one's life becomes significant. 

Is antesequential causation, however, con- 
fined to persons ? Are there no traces of 
teleology in nature ? Until recently scientific 
men have been pretty well agreed that there 
are none, at least that it is no part of the work 
of science to regard them. Bacon thought 
final causes barren virgins, attractive in ap- 
pearance but incapable of producing anything ; 
and ever since his time inquirers have been 
warned off this ground as a region where 
vagueness, individual caprice, and lack of 
method are hardly to be avoided. 

To-day these warnings are less stern. There 
is a suspicion abroad that man and nature 
cannot be kept altogether apart. In certain 
quarters something like a teleologic back- 
ground is employed as a basis for scientific 
research. The science of our time chiefly 
differs from that of our fathers in its employ- 
ment of the principle of evolution or devel- 
opment. Now evolution is something more 
than change. It is change tending in a prede- 
termined direction, movement toward a mark, 



KINDS OF CAUSATION 101 

progress to an end. We cannot understand a 
course of development until we bear in mind 
some end or type which it realizes. If then we 
are clear-sighted and take development seri- 
ously, we must suppose its far-off issue is not 
without influence on the changes which lead 
up to it, that its end or type does in some 
sense bias the whole course of developing 
events. Kightly or wrongly a teleologic thought 
usually attends the evolutionist. Yet even so, 
purposes do not need to be assumed in things. 
A purpose implies personal will, and I do not 
see that a scientific man who guides his in- 
vestigation by the clue of development must 
presuppose a personal will in nature. Only if 
he does not, he will still imagine a goal or 
end as lending significance to a series of 
changes. And this is just what we have been 
describing as antesequential causation. 

It is true nobody yet knows what precise 
place science will ultimately accord to evolu- 
tion. Yet it is striking to notice how the 
Darwinian doctrine of natural selection — 
the theory of evolution which relies most on 
scattered changes and accidental coagulation 
— is breaking down through lack of organiz- 
ing power. Many biologists declare that the 



102 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

harmonious wholes which nature regularly 
produces could not come into being without 
some provision for coordinating the mass of 
small unrelated changes with reference to an 
anticipated end. Theories of organic evolution 
are now in the air. I am not entitled to an 
opinion as to the probable result in so techni- 
cal a matter. Certainly the great body of 
workers in physical science still desire to 
banish teleology from their field. But in view 
of present controversies I have not felt justi- 
fied in claiming antesequentiality exclusively 
for persons. In them it appears most distinctly. 
Whether it will ever be proved to permeate 
things remains to be seen. 

IV 

As we have now reached a kind of turning 
point in our discussion, it may be well to gather 
up the conclusions thus far reached and see where 
we stand. When anything happens it will always 
be proper to ask what made it happen ; always 
nonsense to suggest that possibly nothing 
did. Causation is universal. No such thing as 
an isolated event is known. Should one occur, 
there could be no evidence of it, lying as it 
would outside our entire universe. In our 



KINDS OF CAUSATION 103 

world everything has connection with a past 
and a future. But this connection manifests 
itself in a twofold form. The first or se- 
quential form dominates physical objects. 
As things existing, these are bound up with 
what already exists and not, so far as can be 
distinctly traced, with anything beyond. Hu- 
man beings are to a large extent things also and 

o o o 

to that extent are sequentially caused. They de- 
rive what they now are from what they and 
the world have been. But there is also in them 
a strange power of imaginative forecast by which 
they are able to lay hold of the future and 
make it a factor in shaping the present ; and 
this is antesequential causation, the ground of 
freedom. Freedom being the fixing of a single 
issue out of two or more possible ones, it will 
always be present when antesequential causa- 
tion occurs. For in this case there will have 
been at least the alternatives of purposive or 
unpurposive action, and probably also a variety 
of possible purposes will have been surveyed, 
with different means for their execution. If 
there is any such thing as antesequential cau- 
sation — which I have shown to be more than 
likely — then freedom is a reality. 



104 TEE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 



A doctrine of freedom thus understood has 
close relations with determinism. I have said 
that determinism is contrasted with the old 
necessarianism in this, that under the necessa- 
rian scheme a person is a creature of circum- 
stance. His environment prompts him to ac- 
tion and through him that prompting passes 
on as the motion transmitted from the engine 
passes through the car. From oneself, however, 
comes no shaping contribution. Circumstance 
rules the world. Or we may take circumstance 
in its most abstract form and talk of the un- 
avoidableness of fate or divine volition. But 
here the determinist parts from his necessarian 
ancestor, declaring that conduct comes not 
from circumstance alone, but from circumstance 
plus character. What we are is a factor con- 
stantly modifying our environment. Persons of 
different characters will behave differently un- 
der the same circumstances. Out of the inter- 
action of two agencies all conduct proceeds. 

Now this is a formula which may be used 
by those not sworn to determinism. Liber- 
tarian as to some extent I feel myself compelled 
to be, I heartily accept the deterministic 



KINDS OF CAUSATION 105 

formula and think every act of mine directly 
caused by my character and circumstances, 
the conjunction of the two. Only the formula 
appears to me ambiguous. " Character " is 
merely another name for " self/' conveniently 
indicating the point at which that ever chang- 
ing ego has at any moment arrived. We must 
not be superstitious and imagine that through 
some sort of independent existence character 
controls the self. Yet unless we fall into such 
fancies the formula states just what libertarians 
have always claimed, that self and circumstance 
cooperate in all we do. 

Conceivably one of the factors, self or 
" character," may look as exclusively to its past 
as does the other, " circumstance." But since 
this is the very point at issue it will not do to 
assume it — as determinists are accustomed to 
do — in the very formula. Mankind in general 
believes that character includes possibilities 
as well as actualities. To a great extent, no 
doubt, it is shaped by its past — its heredity, 
education, habits, physical setting, social ad- 
justment — but it also looks toward a future and 
out of that future is able to draw a causative 
power for shaping its circumstances and its 
own partially formed being to new issues. If 



Jr 



10G THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

we may reject the deterministic fancy that 
character is a finished affair, and may lay it 
open to conscious modifiability from the future, 
the deterministic formula will admirably ex- 
press the conclusions to which we have been 
brought. 

Without some such interpretation it is hard 
to see how the new doctrine approaches the 
facts of real lif e more closely than did the old 
necessarianism. That was abandoned because 
it denied me any share in my own actions, 
They were settled outside me, observed but 
not directed by my own consciousness. Against 
a view so external determinism protested. The 
man himself, it said, is a considerable perhaps 
a chief, factor in conduct. Character counts. 
There is such a transforming reaction of 
character on circumstance that by it results 
are brought about which would not otherwise 
have arisen. But about the nature of this 
reaction we may well inquire. A bullet fired 
at a granite boulder bounds off ; fired at a 
pine tree, it sinks in. It encounters different 
characters in the two objects and so shows 
different reactions. In this sense character is 
universal, each object reacting in a special 
mode on its environment. If character is no 



KINDS OF CAUSATION 107 

more than this, or with a powerless conscious- 
ness added, then determinism says nothing 
but what necessarianism has always said. 
Boulder, pine, and I had our characters im- 
parted to us at the first tenuous beginning of 
creation and one who was clear-sighted might 
have discerned in those beginnings every 
action which we have since performed. 

The fact is, determinism is a compromise 
doctrine, which has gained currency chiefly 
through its vagueness. It would respect the 
orderly universe of necessarianism ; it would 
also respect superintending man ; but it has 
never worked out the adjustment of the two. It 
accordingly asserts strongly the invariability 
of causation, hinting however in its word char- 
acter at some sort of modifying personal in- 
fluence. But unless this influence works 
through another kind of causation than the 
sequential, the acts of a human being will be 
restricted as rigidly as are all other motions. 
We need not then trouble ourselves much 
about the words determinism, character, or 
circumstance. The important question is 
whether our past has through and through 
locked up our future, or whether anticipations 
of that future may have influence in offsetting 



108 TEE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

what the past brings down. It has been the 
aim of this chapter to make that issue plain, 
and I have not hesitated to indicate the deci- 
sion to which the evidence leads me, 



CHAPTER VI 

THE WOEKING OF IDEALS 
I 

With this chapter a new stage of our in- 
quiry begins, a stage of objection and criticism. 
A rational doctrine of libertarianism is now 
in large outline before us. I believe it to be a 
doctrine which, while avoiding the extravagance 
of popular libertarianism, is more exact and 
more inclusive than popular determinism or 
ancient necessarianism. It provides room for 
facts which all of these ignore. No event, it 
agrees, occurs without cause, but the future is 
as great a storehouse of causation as the past. 
Between the two stands the queer creature 
man who through a forward-stretching, back- 
ward-rooted consciousness is accessible to each 
and capable by voluntary adjustments of cut- 
ting off or granting approach to either. He 
thus possesses a freedom unknown elsewhere. 

But while I believe this outline will hold 
firm, I think it far too simply drawn. We can- 
not count the doctrine ours until we have 



110 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

explored its difficulties, turned ourselves 
against it with searching questions, and seen 
with what facts of life it is least in accord. On 
first approaching a subject it is well to have a 
receptive mind, to gather converging facts, 
and somewhat credulously to build up a tentat- 
ive hypothesis. But this once constructed, 
fault-finding should follow and free play be 
given to the spirit which persistently denies. 
The old maxim is sound, that the exception 
proves the rule. Only we should understand 
" proves" to mean "tests, " "puts to proof." 
If then we would fully comprehend our doc- 
trine, we must now address ourselves to hunt- 
ing out objections to it, that is, cases where 
it apparently breaks down. To this business 
of exploring difficulties most of the remaining 
chapters will be devoted. 

ii 

I turn first to the puzzle which has most 
seriously disturbed my own thought, the 
source and operation of ideals. Where do they 
come from ? Is it not from out that very 
past where lie hidden all other seeds of the 
future ? Years ago when as a young man I was 
trying to traverse the mental wilderness of 



THE WORKING OF IDEALS 111 

freedom and could find no clear path, I hit on 
the illuminating distinction between causation 
of the past and of the future, between sequen- 
tial and antesequential causation, and at once 
progress became possible. While before in 
clumsy fashion I had been trying to conceive 
freedom as something which stopped causation, 
I now perceived that it merely implied an alter- 
native between two contrasted kinds. For a 
time I took great comfort in the simple doc- 
trine until one day doubt fell on me and I won- 
dered whether I had not been altogether befog- 
ging myself. For grant that such a distinction 
exists, still does not antesequential causation 
itself operate through a special variety of 
sequential? The man runs after the car. At first 
his running seems caused by that which has no 
existence, his sitting in the car. This sitting is 
ideal, not actual, and his movement we said 
was induced not by the past or present, but 
by the future. Yet was the statement exact ? 
He would not run unless an idea of sitting 
in that car were already in his mind. Surely 
that idea is actual. It must be present. Does it 
not then operate as a sequential cause? It is 
true that this mental fact is not transformed 
into outward reality until the man has taken 



112 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

his seat. But it was not the unrealized sitting 
which made him run ; it was the idea of sit- 
ting, and this is actual. Are we not then jug- 
gling with words in talking ah out non- 
actual causes and assuming that what makes 
one run is the physical seat in the car? That, 
of course, does not exist till the end. But why 
should it ? It is an effect not a cause. What 
starts the man is the thought of sitting there, 
a thought entirely real and present. That 
thought brings movement as its sequence, just 
as the expanding steam of the engine has for 
its sequence the moving of the car. The two 
forces are no doubt of different orders. One is 
a conscious affair ; the other has nothing to do 
with consciousness. One operates exclusively 
in the material world ; the other, in the world of 
mind. But this does not affect their sequen- 
tially. In both cases we are obliged to have 
an actual existent cause at hand before any- 
thing occurs. Eeal and present causes are 
therefore the only causes. Ideal or future ones 
only become causes after passing through the 
reality of present time. 

So I reasoned, and for a long while it 
seemed that all my work must be done over 
again. I was turned back into jungles where 



THE WORKING OF IDEALS 113 

I wandered as obscurely as before, falling with 
every attempted step. As I recall the dreary 
period, something like two years went by be- 
fore I was able to discover any way past the 
bewildering obstacle. For obstacle it was, 
though I was not seeking to establish any 
particular doctrine and had no more interest 
in freedom than in determinism, merely desir- 
ing to see anything clearly. But I was plagued 
with the suspicion that there was a larger 
difference between the two kinds of causa- 
tion than the objection permitted me to assert. 
What it was, I could not discover. There I 
stood in perplexity, turning the matter this 
way and that, unable to find satisfaction. 

in 

It would be unreasonable to demand that 
what required a couple of years to bring me 
conviction should convince another in five 
minutes. My reader may therefore properly 
dissent from what I offer him here. Let him 
do his own thinking ; I can merely start in- 
quiry by indicating the conclusion I reached 
and something of the path along which I 



Unquestionably it is true that an idea often 



114 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

works sequentially and brings about immediate 
action through its mere mental presence. All 
have had the experience, for reaction to envi- 
ronment is universal. Nothing in nature touches 
its neighbor without influencing it. An idea 
in my mind accordingly breeds changes in my 
other ideas and, if unchecked, in my move- 
ments too. Ideas are forces. Sequentially may 
go on among them as readily as among things. 
What a cause works in, whether mind or 
matter, determines nothing in regard to its 
nature. A few illustrations will make the 
matter plain. 

The particles of a stone cohere and grav- 
itate into unity not through deference to any 
plan of becoming united with itself and with 
all things, but through blindly following a 
physical and chemic sequence. We put a seed 
in the ground, pour water on it, and it begins 
to expand. But it does not expand with refer- 
ence to a possible future. We may fancy that 
it forecasts a day when it will be a tree, with 
the present sprouting as its first stage ; it is 
interested in shooting out a little root here or 
there so as to support its ultimate branches. 
But this is a fiction. No future whatever is 
contemplated. There has merely been a stim- 



TEE WORKING OF IDEALS 115 

ulus of the environment on this side or on 
that, and reaction of a defined type has fol- 
lowed. Or I touch the leaf of the sensitive 
plant and it closes ; not because it perceives 
that it will be damaged if it remains open, 
but by a reflex action according to which the 
passive experience of the leaf is at once trans- 
formed into its active closing. A similar pro- 
vision exists in our own physical structure. 
When a light is suddenly brought into a dark 
room, my eye shuts. I might calculate that 
the flood of light would damage the delicate 
mechanism and that it would be well to draw 
down the protecting curtain and preserve the 
organ for future use. But such calculations 
are unnecessary and in fact are not made. I 
cannot keep the eye open. The mere feeling 
of the light makes the lids close. 

Throughout our physical frame such re- 
flexes occur, throughout our mental structure 
also. A certain thought may be so knitted 
with another that the second regularly follows 
the appearance of the first. If that second is 
a thought of action, action follows. I do not 
steer the action ; it occurs sequentially, in- 
stinctively. I have often thought we might 
best illustrate the workings of these reflex 



116 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

instincts by one of our household pests, the 
telephone. In speaking with my friend on the 
other side of the city I communicate with him 
through a central office and a central office 
girl. To her my words first go and her mind, 
if she has one, forms the link between that 
in-coming bit of telephone wire and the out- 
going bit. But a contrivance has been de- 
vised by which my voice, entering that central 
office and agitating a special key, itself con- 
nects the two wires. We may then drop the 
central consciousness and let what is brought 
by the incoming wire pass uninterruptedly into 
the out-going wire. 

Exactly this occurs in reflex action. An 
object excites the nerve of my eye, and the 
excitement passes on to my central office of 
consciousness. There I survey it, questioning 
in what direction an order for action had 
better be sent. When this is decided, I start 
the outgoing nerve. But such deliberation is 
not essential nor always well. There are times 
when waiting for the central consciousness to 
reflect would cost us the opportunity for action. 
Accordingly it is provided that deliberation 
may be omitted, a direct mechanic connection 
be established between sensation and action, 



THE WOBKltiG OF IDEALS 117 

and that very result occur which would have 
been judged best had we deliberated. Such 
expeditious connections are known as instincts 
or reflex actions. To establish them and success- 
fully eliminate consciousness is a time-taking 
affair, usually requiring many generations. 
But habit is a process similar, though less 
complete, whose importance in carrying on the 
daily machinery of life I have explained in a 
previous chapter. 

IV 

Now it is entirely possible that when the 
man sees the car running the sight of it may 
through habit excite the nerves and muscles 
of his legs to propel him along the path in its 
train without conscious intention on his part 
and without regard for his future. Such semi- 
instinctive actions are common enough. As 
I enter my study this morning to write this 
chapter, I see a newspaper lying on the table. 
An unread newspaper always suggests to me 
stretching out my hand, and almost automat- 
ically the hand goes forth. I do not intend to 
read the paper, but to pick it up seems unavoid- 
able. Having it in my hand, the impulse is 
strong to run my eye down a column. And 



118 THE PBOBLEM OF FREEDOM 

when I have once begun to read, each mo- 
ment compels another moment of reading 
until, as I look up, I see that an hour of the 
precious morning is gone and my chapter will 
not be completed to-day. I had no intention 
here, compared no alternatives, depicted no 
future. In a half -instinctive way, as beasts 
may be driven or children, an idea pushed me 
to action, one act to another, and so on. All 
of us are well aware how often this sort of 
thing occurs. It would be idle then to deny 
that an idea may be the sequential cause of 
another idea or even of an act. 

Yet surely this is not the whole story, an 
adequate account of the way in which ideas 
normally influence conduct. Acknowledging 
that an idea does again and again induce ac- 
tion merely because it is here — a fact, some- 
thing derived from our past, a present cause 
— we must also see that an idea often influ- 
ences us through its prophetic quality, by its 
indication of what the future may bring forth. 
The idea which sent my outstretched hand 
toward that newspaper, might, if scrutinized, 
have disclosed its significance and I might 
have formed a judgment whether reading or 
writing was the better employment. 



THE WORKING OF IDEALS 119 

What I desire to point out then is that 
ideas have different modes of affecting us. 
They may work as present facts, like other 
parts of our environment, in a purely habit- 
ual or reflex way; and certainly then we 
come under the influence of sequential causa- 
tion. Or ideas may appeal to us through their 
representative character, depicting what may 
hereafter occur; and by their report of what 
lies ahead may influence us as truly as by their 
actuality. When the importance of an idea is 
found on this its representative or prophetic 
side, we add the letter I to it ; an idea becomes 
an ideal. A difference of function separates 
the two. Operating as a present fact, an idea 
has just the same causative influence as any 
other present fact ; operating through its sug- 
gested possibilities, it becomes a personal 
ideal. The same idea then may have a two- 
fold causal working. 

Accordingly we were not in error in dis- 
tinguishing between sequential and antese- 
quential causation, only it would be wrong to 
suppose that all our ideas work in the ante- 
sequential way. As I have already explained, 
the great body of them, even of those which 
relate to action, do not. Through the general 



120 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

current of our hum-drum days we are im- 
pelled by whatever enters our mind, impelled 
not otherwise than the brute or the physical 
object, except indeed that we are generally 
conscious of what is happening. But when an 
idea is seen to report some possible future of 
myself, I am likely to inquire whether that is 
the only possibility. Soon I detect others, and 
then there arises that selective process or 
deliberative choice which distinguishes volun- 
tary action from instinctive. For now recog- 
nizing that one or the other of several possi- 
bilities may become actual, recognizing too 
that I have a hindering and a prompting 
power, I question why I should choose one 
rather than the other. For weighing alterna- 
tives a standard of value is essential, some- 
thing unnecessary in passing through the 
single issues of a sequential series. That stand- 
ard is found in my total welfare, and I con- 
tinually ask which of several courses will 
draw from the circumstances around me the 
largest contribution to my good. That is 
counted best which enables me most fully 
and coherently to bring out sides of myself 
hitherto suppressed. Not, as has been said, 
that conduct regularly proceeds in this way. 



THE WOBKING OF IDEALS 121 

More commonly it moves in deterministic 
fashion, following sequentially the promptings 
which come from past and present character 
and environment. But the forecasting process 
is ordinarily open to us ; and when we speak 
of personal causation, it is precisely this we 
mean. Our peculiar constitution enables us to 
employ ideals instead of mere ideas. And the 
moment I ask the great question what is the 
value of one of these ideal possibilities to me, 
I am living in a moral and not a merely nat- 
ural world. In the latter I am guided sequen- 
tially to one fixed issue; in the former I steer 
myself antesequentially among alternative 
possibilities. 

It may be well to notice here how different 
is the suspense of ideals in mental delibera- 
tion from the balance and composition of 
natural forces. When two physical forces 
conflict or press in different directions, a 
pause may come bearing a certain resem- 
blance to deliberation. In a mechanical me- 
taphor we often speak of weighing divergent 
considerations. But there is this difference 
between mechanic and teleologic hesitancy. 
Even during their seeming pause natural 
forces are still at work and when they go 



122 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

forth they produce a resultant in which all 
are represented. Nothing similar can he ob- 
served in voluntary suspense. There the sev- 
eral inducements are held for a time in strict 
inefficiency; and when at last a decision is 
reached, a single factor is picked out to re- 
ceive the right of way and the rest disappear. 
Surely this marvel of suspended volition is 
more compatible with the libertarian's con- 
scious supervising self than with the determ- 
inistic notion that there is no other self than 
a series of successive mental changes. 



Probably a few words are needed in regard 
to the mode of connection between ideals and 
realities, especially in those departments of 
life where we are aiming at an increase of our 
health, wealth, learning, reputation or any 
other form of personal good. Before acting 
on an ideal it would seem that we should 
have a completed plan, should know what we 
seek to accomplish and be fairly sure that 
we have the power to reach our intended end. 
Certainly ideals are often employed in this 
way. Before a single stone is set in a build- 
ing the size and shape of each block is deter- 



THE WORKING OF IDEALS 123 

mined, the blocks are hewn, marked, and an 
exact understanding reached of what the 
place of each shall be in the completed struct- 
ure. The architect decides how large and ex- 
pensive a house is required, what rooms it 
should contain, what strain its beams must 
bear, and how solid should be its foundations. 
All this he ideally anticipates before actual 
construction begins. Is it in this way that we 
proceed in elaborating our own well-being, in 
" building up the beings that we are "? 

I do not understand it so. Though per- 
sonal causation gets its cogency from the fut- 
ure, and though we are occupied all day long 
in subjugating the present with reference to 
our advantageous futures, I believe we rarely 
foresee that future of ourselves as the archi- 
tect foresees that of his building. Instead of 
starting with the notion of what we should 
be were we complete, we set forth from the 
other end, with a sense of our own littleness. 
We aim at betterment and not at a finished 
best. Usually the first prompter of action is 
an apprehension of some need, impoverish- 
ment, or pain. I was not drawn to dinner to- 
day by picturing the powerful frame which I 
hope to acquire through years of careful diet. 



124 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

Some such vague notion may have lain in the 
back of my mind, but my immediate incentive 
was hunger. I was uncomfortable, weak, and 
sought to be rid of these checks and hin- 
drances. So we constantly act. A boy goes to 
college because he knows how ignorant he is, 
not because of a vision of what he would be 
if altogether wise. The merchant seeks wealth 
through finding himself hampered by narrow 
means. Everywhere some restriction, limit or 
need is our prompter to personal progress. For 
while we may say we sometimes act out of 
exuberance and for the mere sake of express- 
ing the abundance of life we feel, yet this is 
true only when that unexpressed abundance 
is still attended with some sense of incom- 
pleteness. The negative factor, the feeling of 
restriction, is that which keeps the personal 
world in motion. Desire may accordingly be 
defined as the felt disparity between a present 
limited state of being and one with the limit- 
ation removed. It is true that when other 
conditions are reached, fresh limitations will 
be found and new desires spring, and to this 
experience there is no end. But neither is 
there to man's aspiration and enlargement. 



THE WORKING OF IDEALS 125 

VI 

These considerations will sufficiently answer 
the question about the origin of ideals with 
which this chapter began. Ideals are not ar- 
bitrary things, of another order than facts, 
existing by themselves in futurity, and by us 
endowed with command over the present. 
Such abstract entities could get no hold on an 
orderly world. Ideals are merely realities filled 
out. They express realities which have been be- 
gun but have been left half finished. More real 
therefore are well-constructed ideals, though 
less actual, than the realities themselves; 
for they set forth in full significance that which 
reality has been unable to attain. Only they 
must be obediently fashioned and contain 
nothing fanciful. We form an ideal horse not 
by dropping the four legs, ear-crowned head, 
shapely body, and inner organs which we see 
the animal now to possess. We do not start un- 
prejudiced in the construction of our creature. 
A sound ideal would be based on a study of 
how these parts have failed to work completely 
together and of the adjustments needed to 
bring them into closer unity. So must our 
runner after the car shape his ideal of obtain- 



126 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

ing a seat there with reference to the speed 
of the train, its time of arrival, the other means 
of conveyance, his strength of leg and heart, 
and the importance of his reaching home at 
just such an hour. Failure to take these facts 
into account will render his ideal useless. Man- 
ifestly the popular notion is absurd that ideals 
rest on no solid ground, but are airy creatures, 
begotten of each whimsical mind according 
to its wayward pleasure. We contribute some- 
thing to the shaping of them, it is true, since 
we design them to mark out paths to our fut- 
ure betterment. But realities dictate to them 
no less than they to realities ; for they are or- 
derly affairs, having laws as firm though more 
subtle than the things around us. Parted from 
these, they do not reach actuality. Yet it is 
evident from their outlook on the future that 
they can never be sequentially derived from the 
past. The car could not directly produce an 
ideal of running. That ideal it might sug- 
gest; but before this could become an ideal 
another factor would need to be added. The 
man must appraise a place in the car as bet- 
ter than one outside, contemplating the two 
as future possibilities, and himself as restrict- 
ing them to a single issue. 



THE WORKING OF IDEALS 127 

VII 

A brief summary of this intricate chapter 
may now help to its completer understanding. 
The doctrine of libertarianism which we have 
accepted maintains that while causation is 
unbroken everywhere, a special form of it 
may proceed from persons, modifying with a 
view to their future good the sequences which 
have descended from their past. But the pro- 
blem then met us of where these antesequen- 
tial causes come from and whether they too 
do not reach the future by way of the present 
and the past. I have acknowledged that in 
large measure they do. The past, in the form 
of associated ideas and reflex or habitual acts, 
often brings about sequentially the same results 
as they ; and an unrealized future can work 
changes in the current of sequential causation 
only by itself becoming for the moment a 
present idea. The ideal, too, clings to the actual, 
representing merely what is still needed for 
its completion, ideals of our welfare moving 
away from the imperfect present only toward 
an immediate betterment, but not usually so 
far as to the vision of an ultimate and complete 
best. 



CHAPTER VII 

CHANCE 
I 

So much for our first difficulty. But a diffi- 
culty more commonly felt now lies before us. 
Having seen that we possess ideals and learned 
how they originate, we have still to inquire 
about a field for their exercise. For in what 
sort of world could they find room to operate 
except in one which has in its constitution a 
certain element of chance? In approaching 
this dark region I hesitate, knowing how hard 
it is here to be clear-sighted oneself, how 
much harder to clear up the mind of another. 
Here I enter on more contentious ground than 
has been crossed before. In this chapter I 
shall clash against deep prejudices, prejudices 
which my readers will rightly regard as im- 
portant, representing as they do men's regular 
ways of regarding this world. I shall call 
on my readers to view it differently ; and 
my novel modes will, I dare say, seem de- 
structive of much which gives that world its 



CHANCE 129 

worth. Some persons may even suspect that 
the doctrines proposed savor of superstition. 
Let no such thoughts be checked. Let them 
be fostered rather. All who read should differ 
from me as deeply as they can. I have tried to 
differ from myself, and fundamentally ques- 
tioned how to escape from the conclusions I 
here present. Just such questioning I desire 
from my readers ; for my aim is not to impose 
my opinions on others, but to stimulate them 
to vigorous and connected thought of their 
own. Let us then together enter this repellent 
region and scrutinize the obstacles which hedge 
it in. 

Our first business will be to see why we 
need treat of chance at all, when so many 
other disturbing topics are already on our 
hands. In my judgment we cannot escape it. 
A field must be provided where freedom can 
move, and no such field appears. Suppose we 
agree that a man is endowed with a power of 
reaching forward into the future and drawing 
from it influences by which the present may 
be shaped. Yet where could he exercise so 
curious a faculty in a world like ours? Here 
all physical events are bound together by 
sequential cause. I have acknowledged that no 



130 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

clear-sighted person in our day can suppose 
that at certain points the laws of sequential 
causation are suspended and that what we 
used to call a "miracle" occurs. The determin- 
istic argument obliges me, at least, to attach 
some other meaning to the word "miracle" 
or else to divest it of all meaning whatever. 
But if in this way no event is loose, uncon- 
joined with one which antedates it, how is it 
possible to reach into the future and shape by 
what lies there the already determined pre- 
sent? From the present must go forth exactly 
those fixed sequences which invariably spring 
from these conditions. In our world nothing 
is arbitrary ; it is a world of law. 

To this conception of the universe as a 
cosmos, an embodiment of universal law, man- 
kind has painfully climbed until we now look 
back with wonder on that infancy of the race 
when caprice and arbitrariness were accepted 
in explanation of what happens. Yet this 
infantile world full of uncertainties is the 
only adequate home for freedom, while our 
modern orderly system bars its way. Where 
freedom is at work, there must be uncertainty, 
chance, an ambiguous future. Freedom takes 
hold only on possibilities; and in the tightly 



CHANCE 131 

locked world we have been describing there 
is a single fixed issue everywhere. The 
defender of freedom will thus be forced to 
affirm that chance still lingers, and this I am 
hardy enough to maintain. Chance I believe 
meets us continually. Not that I retract my 
former statement. Each event is linked with 
that which went before. But while I see 
sequential causation everywhere, I see free 
action also. Accordingly I am obliged to de- 
fend something so paradoxical as chance or an 
ambiguous future in a world where all is caus- 
ally connected. 

Evidently then the topic of this chapter is 
likely to prove repellent. In the preceding 
years I have repeatedly tried to discover 
whether I might not escape one or the other 
of its harsh alternatives. But I find no way. 
Both are certainly true and in some degree 
are confessed to be so by everybody. We all 
employ the word chance and imagine we 
mean something by it. The most ardent natur- 
alist, insisting most stoutly on the reign of 
law, cannot altogether cleanse his mouth of 
the word. It and its compeers play an import- 
ant part in life. Chance, luck, casualty, hap- 
penings, accident — take these and kindred 



132 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

words from our speech, and we should not 
easily communicate with one another. Since 
these words maintain a persistent life through 
all the advance of science, they must have 
some use and point to something about which 
we often need to speak. 

ii 

What that something is, is plain enough it 
may be said. Chance means uncertainty ; not 
uncertainty in the frame of things, but uncer- 
tainty in the beholding mind. That is all. 
Chance is a negative term. It announces the 
absence of knowledge and is a way of stating 
ignorance. When we cannot trace the causa- 
tive connections which have brought an event 
about, we say it was due to chance. Such a word 
furnishes a convenient label for marking oc- 
currences as still dark. Not detecting the tie 
between A and B, we say B follows A by 
chance, meaning merely that there is uncer- 
tainty there. This uncertainty it would be 
ridiculous to suppose exists in the order of 
things, but it is far from ridiculous to say 
that I can discover no bond. By chance then 
I indicate nothing of a positive kind, but 
merely state that as yet I have no full ac- 



CHANCE 133 

quaintance with A, B, and their connec- 
tions. 

A few instances will set forth this frequent 
meaning of chance. I shake my dice-box, 
and say it is all chance how the dice will fall. 
Nobody understands that in the brief space 
between box and table causal agency is sus- 
pended, nothing obliging one of the dice to 
turn up the number six. I certainly never in- 
tended such a notion, rather this : it is imposs- 
ible so precisely to reckon the forces which 
steer that bit of ivory that we can forecast the 
number which will finally appear. Such min- 
uteness of knowledge implies a delicacy in 
observing the complex play of forces about 
those little objects which nobody to-day pos- 
sesses; and though lean make a fairly accur- 
ate guess as to the frequency with which the 
number six will turn up, this will not at all 
hinder my attributing the result to chance ; 
for I still wish to mark the fact that I know 
nothing of the way in which laws of gravita- 
tion have been attacking the different sides 
of the cube. Its fall is therefore uncertain, 
uncertain to my mind and to any mind simil- 
arly constituted. 

Or again, I may properly say that it is all 



134 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

an accident whether to-morrow will be fair or 
foul. Of course the trains of sequence are al- 
ready laid which will develop one sort of day 
or the other. But the causal paths are so man- 
ifold, a knowledge of them dependent on so 
many conflicting considerations, that I can- 
not follow them. Even the prophet of the 
newspapers finds them tangled to such a 
degree that there is much uncertainty about 
our getting the weather he promises. Yet in 
speaking so we do not mean that causal ties 
break over night. The agencies now working 
for a sunshiny morning will not cease during 
the darkness and allow uncaused clouds to 
appear. An accident is only a defect in know- 
ledge. In short, all terms of chance indicate 
subjective conditions, not objective ones, point 
out a deficiency in the human mind and not in 
nature, an absence from our thought of some- 
thing which might better have attended it. 

in 

Is this the only meaning of chance, or is 
chance also objective ? I believe it is objective. 
This world is not altogether an orderly affair. 
I hold that, apart from our defective know- 
ledge, there are uncertainties in the nature of 






CHANCE 135 

things. In offering a doctrine so unfashionable 
I had probably better state at once a case where 
chance can be seen to be present and then ex- 
amine critically how far such chance conflicts 
with the reign of law. 

Suppose I am throwing stones at a mark. 
Each stone I hurl as vigorously as possible 
and all in the same direction. As I throw the 
last one a bird flies across; and the stone, in- 
stead of moving unimpeded to its mark, col- 
lides with him. He is killed. What killed him ? 
Chance ; his death was due to accident. Of 
course this does not mean that there was no 
causal sequence attending the death and that 
his existence ceased of itself. Everybody 
knows it was the stone's blow that killed him 
and that it would kill any similar bird in sim- 
ilar circumstances. On that point there is no 
dispute. Sequential causes were at work and 
without them the bird would not have died. 
Where then is the chance? It is found in the 
concurrence of the flight of the bird and the 
flight of the stone. What induced that? The 
bird was propelled to that particular spot 
through a long series of sequential agencies. 
He is an instinctive creature, operated, we will 
suppose, entirely by reflex action, which inevit- 



136 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

ably brought him to this place. In a similar 
fashion the stone was projected from me 
sequentially. It is true I was conscious of the 
process, even had in mind the ideal of reach- 
ing a certain mark. But, after all, I was ob- 
liged to use causal agencies, sequential agen- 
cies, to effect my purpose, and there stretched 
behind my action a long series of such agencies, 
inducing me at just that moment to think of 
throwing the stone. I threw, and it reached a 
certain point in the air at just the moment the 
bird also reached that point. But what, I re- 
peat, caused that " also " ? What brought 
about that coordination of the one sequential 
series with the other? The two lines of se- 
quence intersect. For each of the two the 
causation is complete and evident: it is se- 
quential causation, fixed, invariable, each 
line secured by its past and capable of only a 
single issue in the future. We do not inquire 
therefore what induced these lines of sequence. 
But there is a something more. What induced 
their intersection? Can any sequential cause 
explain that? I do not see how. Coordination 
enters into no successive line. Think out each 
one of these lines as elaborately as we may, we 
shall never detect collision in it, the coexistence 



CHANCE 137 

of two sets of motion at the same spot. Neither 
of these lines is premonitory of the other. 
Their coordination lies entirely outside each. 
When then I inquire what brought about the 
collision, one answer will be that nothing at 
all did, it was an affair of chance ; the two 
sequential series, each absolutely blind, butted 
into each other at this special point and were 
in no wise prepared for the collision. The 
only other conceivable answer is that an ante- 
sequential cause intervened from outside 
either series. Seeing the bird flying and reck- 
oning how long he would require to reach that 
spot, I guided my stone by anticipation; at 
a certain moment he will be in a certain position, 
and my stone shall be on hand to meet him 
there. In this second case one of the lines of 
sequence has some bearing on the other. 
There has been a genuine coordination, ante- 
sequence, or plan. In the former, there are 
merely two unseeing lines of sequence, neither 
regardful of anything in the other's course. 
Either, then, there was no cause for the collision 
and merely one for each set of two headlong 
motions, or else a coordinating cause came from 
some other source than they and was itself of 
a different type. I see no escape from this 



138 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

dilemma. Only a thoughtless person could sup- 
pose the collision to be contained in either 
sequence. 

Now what I call the field of chance is this 
field of coexistence ; and this is also the field 
of freedom. The possibility of the one is 
staked on the possibility of the other. Before 
we can arrive at any intelligible doctrine of 
freedom, we must be convinced of the object- 
ive reality of chance. Not that I would assert 
that wherever there is coordination free action 
has occurred. Many a time we find no free 
action whatever, and yet there is coincidence. 
For such coincidences we do well, I believe, 
to say there is no proper cause, that they are 
affairs of chance, luck, or accident; for these 
terms by no means exclude sequential causa- 
tion, moving in straight lines. They merely 
note the absence of those antesequential terms 
by which combinations are effected. Chance 
might be defined as planless concurrence ; and 
when it is so defined, we discover it all around 
us, in great things and in small. It was an 
accident that the winter was exceptionally 
severe after the landing on our shore of the 
Pilgrim Fathers; that the tower of Siloam fell 
on those particular persons ; that the partridge 



CHANCE 139 

flew past me when I did not have my gun. 
The liberties of England are largely due to 
chance in the storm which arose soon after 
the sailing of the Spanish Armada. For how- 
ever minutely we might become acquainted 
with the sequence of conditions which led up 
to the storm, or to that other sequence which 
led up to the sailing, we should never discover 
the wreck among them. That was an accident, 
the coming together of two independent lines 
of causation which until that coinciding mo- 
ment had no reference to one another. 

A piece of chance shaped my life. As a 
young man I sought a place at a Western 
university. I was appointed, but the letter in- 
forming me was lost in the mail. After wait- 
ing through several disconsolate weeks, I 
accepted a position at Harvard. Every man's 
experience will furnish similar instances ; for 
no day goes by, no hour, in which we are not 
met by some accident or other. The world is 
full of such things. Its parts straggle and 
conflict and ignore one another, and demon- 
strate how far it is from being a complete 
organic whole. Such unity we may conceive 
as its goal, but it is not its present condition. 
We were in error in speaking of the world as 



140 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

ruled by law ; it is ruled by laws, each pretty 
regardless of its neighbor. Everywhere it is 
the business of mind to bring these laws into 
cooperation. The world's melodies, its ties of 
succession, are due to its own mechanism ; its 
harmonies are either ethical or accidental. 

IV 

To a universe so imperfectly organized some 
readers may object, remembering the saying 
of a singularly wise book that " not a sparrow 
falls to the ground without your Father." On 
religious grounds they may assert that the 
world contains no particle of chance. Lines 
of sequence pushing their blind way onward 
may be blind so far as they themselves are 
concerned, but they are all prompted by a 
mind behind. That mind behind foresees the 
issue to which each shall come and has already 
prepared for that issue the material with which 
it shall combine. Therefore all concurrent 
happenings are inwardly harmonious. A plan 
runs through them. And though we cannot 
always make out the details of that plan, and 
so in our ignorance must often attribute occur- 
rences to luck and chance, yet whoever has 
convinced himself that the ultimate factor in 



CHANCE 141 

the universe is mind and not matter will not 
easily believe that mind can be taken at un- 
awares. He will rather hold, even in those 
cases where the directing mind is least visible, 
that reason remains the lord of all, and is ever 
undisturbed through lines of sequence evolving 
its vast designs. In a rational world there are 
no casualties. 

I would not deny such a faith. I, too, believe 
that an organizing intelligence elaborates the 
world. Indeed this belief is what I am con- 
tending for. I have pointed out that sequence 
introduces no coordinating bond. Wherever 
harmonious working is discoverable we are 
justified in saying that either chance is there 
or mind, human or divine. 

Nor let any one imagine that if our minds 
are to intervene and freely influence the course 
of things they must do so by stopping some line 
of sequence. That would render freedom impos- 
sible ; for lines of sequence are our only tools. 
As free agents we adopt these tools for our 
purposes, pitting off one line of them against 
others in order to bring about the results we 
seek. Nature is conquered by obeying her. 

An illustration from architecture will show 
the process. As the walls of a building rise, 



142 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

there is increasing danger of their toppling 
over. But it would be a silly architect who 
tried to devise means for stopping gravitation, 
vexed because it is always pulling down the 
structure into which he desires to coordinate 
material. No, that destroying gravitation or 
weight must be used for binding the building 
together. To accomplish this the Gothic builder 
hit on an ingenious scheme. Seeing his walls 
incline to topple from each side, he made use 
of their weight and drew them still more 
strongly toward the ground. But he drew 
them also into conflict so that as each pressed 
earthward it threw its weight against the 
other, the one preventing the other from arriv- 
ing there. Through combination he turned 
his destroyer into a helper. One wall thrust in 
this direction, the other in that, and by a com- 
bination of their thrusts they were supported. 
Of course no sequential causation would hold 
a mass of stone in the air. It would soon hurry 
to the ground. Yet this was the problem, how 
to maintain a great body of stone a hundred 
feet from the earth, with open space beneath, 
and gravitation, that never-ceasing force, at 
work to pull it down. But coordinating mind in- 
tervened, providing every cathedral in Europe 



CHANCE 143 

with a secure stone roof. The gravitating 
sequences were forecast and so brought to 
bear one on another as to head each other off. 
The result is neither a miracle nor a mere pro- 
duct of natural law, but an expression of the 
controlling mind of man. 

This adoption and coordination of natural 
forces, so that their concurrence shall be no 
chance affair, is man's daily work. "When a 
physician enters a sick room and finds a fever 
patient lying there, he should not fatalistically 
say, " Fever germs are at work on this human 
tissue and will destroy it. That is a natural 
law. Its sequences are fixed and cannot be 
broken. Ongoing nature must have its way." 
No, it must not, for its ways are ways of 
chance: and the physician is here to abolish 
chance and make the concurrence of natural 
forces set forth human purpose. Accordingly 
by medicine a germ-destroying line of sequence 
is brought to bear on the tissue-destroying 
line and, while no law of nature is broken, 
the resulting recovery may well be called non- 
natural, antesequential, or expressive of an 
end. Left to itself, no line of sequence con- 
siders another. Each forces its way straight 
onward, heedless of what may occur. A few 



144 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

years ago a man in Paris was pursuing investi- 
gations which have revolutionized our thoughts 
of nature. As M. Curie crossed the city one 
morning a wild horse dashed down the street, 
ran over him, and extinguished a life of in- 
calculable worth. It would have trampled a 
drunkard with the same indifference. The light- 
ning strikes a saint as quickly as a sinner. 
Nature knows no values. They are all imparted 
by man. And this lack of consideration by 
Nature for anything more than her single 
sectional movements makes man often cry out 
against her as harsh and brutal. She seems 
alien to ourselves, thwarting as she does with 
her senseless stolidity our best designs. We 
feel helpless and set aside. But it is precisely 
this heedless regularity of Nature which puts 
her in our power. Having no plans of her own, 
she can take on ours. Science removes our 
helplessness when it reveals lines of natural 
sequence. By combining these with reference 
to our antesequential ends we narrow the field 
of chance and impart to our world an or- 
ganization which it does not in itself possess. 
The world is not at present a unit. We are 
engaged in making it one. 



CHANCE 145 



Very properly then does natural science 
confine itself to the study of sequence. When 
it presses beyond this, it easily becomes super- 
stitious. The wise scientist wants merely to 
learn what follows what. Into the relation of 
one event to another, except so far as the two 
are members of the same series, he does not 
inquire. It may be that some disaster of my 
life is coupled with the ascendency of a 
particular planet ; but if so, the connection is 
no fit subject for science, unless the events 
can be made to stand in the same successive 
line. It is with the invariabilities of antecedence 
and succession that science deals. Or if oc- 
casionally a problem of coordination is touched, 
it is merely as a preliminary to the exploration 
of some sequence. A few such coordinative 
problems it may be well to mention. 

When the great earthquake destroyed Mes- 
sina, a furious storm was raging and at the 
same time a tidal wave swept through the 
little strait between Messina and Reggio. 
Three striking events occurred together. It is 
a legitimate question whether the concurrence 
of the three was due to chance or cause. It is 



146 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

already clear that the tidal wave and earth- 
quake were causally connected. Possibly here- 
after some ingenious investigator may be able 
to prove that the storm too was not an affair 
of chance, as it must at present be reckoned. 
If so, he will show that either earthquake or 
wave was a necessary antecedent of the storm, 
or else that all three events came from a com. 
mon antecedent. Cases of the latter sort are so 
common as to have acquired a special name — 
concomitant variations. As A changes, B 
also changes, though no direct influence of 
one over the other is discoverable. But the 
two may spring from the same root and each 
be induced by what induced the other. To 
investigate the common source of several se- 
quences is a proper enough object for scienti- 
fic research. 

In another way, too, the scientific man must 
usually take coordination into account, and 
that is in analyzing his problem. For thus far 
I have unduly simplified our discussion by 
speaking of the cause of an event. Rarely is 
there any such thing. Almost always a group 
of causes cooperate to produce a complex 
result. A scientific investigation must usually 
start with combined effects and trace them 



CHANCE 147 

back to their many causes. But this does not 
oblige the investigator to ask why the many 
causes — A, B and C — came together to 
produce their common effect -3T. To connect 
different portions of that effect with each of 
those causes is sufficient for him. What oc- 
casioned their joint presence is no concern of 
his. The apple does not grow without a seed, 
without sun also, air, earth, and rain. Whether 
these will ever combine, it is not for the scienti- 
fic man to say. Only if chance brings them 
together, such and such results will follow. 
The reasons for their favorable coexistence 
lie outside his province. 

VI 

It is not then the usual coordinations of 
the world with which science deals, though 
these impart to it most of its value, but its 
single lines of sequence, the coming together 
of things being referred either to chance or 
to design. Or will this conclusion still be 
doubted and I be told that most of the trouble 
I have been laboriously explaining comes from 
a too abstract view of causation ? I have marked 
off certain parts of the world into one sequen- 
tial line and certain parts into another, making 



148 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

it our scientific charge to watch these single 
lines. Then I have spoken of them as blind. 
But can causation be confined within such 
narrow bounds? Might we not rather say that 
the cause of any event is the total condition 
of the universe at that moment ? Single lines 
of sequence are not the entire cause of any- 
thing. All that now exists — yes all that ever 
has existed — is necessary before a pin can 
drop. To pick out a few conditions — my open 
fingers, the weight of this special pin, and so 
on — is to put an arbitrary limit on causation. 
"What answer shall we make to an objection 
so fundamental? 

I should say that this line of remark is so 
true as to be practically unimportant. If the 
total condition of the universe is the real cause 
of any event, then it is a cause which each 
moment operates on all events alike and so 
may safely be left out of account. What we 
wish to know is why a particular event occurs 
and how events differ from one another. No 
explanation of this can be found in an undiffer- 
entiated universal cause. A particular result 
must come about through special conditions 
being brought to bear on certain sections of 
that universe. Abstraction therefore is neces- 



CHANCE 149 

sary. The total condition of the universe 
divides itself up into varieties of working 
which we call natural laws, modes of causation 
or lines of sequence. To discover which of 
these has been at work, and under what cir- 
cumstances, requires that delicate isolation of 
attention which we call scientific experiment. 
To conduct it with the greatest precision lab- 
oratories are employed. While nobody in 
them will deny that the total condition of the 
universe is the basis of all cause, it is agreed 
to disregard most of this as constant and to 
observe merely those elements of the grand 
whole which particularize the case in hand, 
i.e., to watch some special line or lines of 
sequence. 

VII 

Through this long and difficult chapter I 
have been trying to work out in detail the 
simple distinction which was set up two chap- 
ters ago. Sequential causation, governing a 
series of events is a different thing from 
antesequential, which is concerned with coexist- 
ences. The one is a natural affair and the sole 
subject of natural science. Coexistences come 
about either through rational plan, or, failing 



150 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

this, are the accidental intersections of unre- 
gardf ul lines of sequence and hence are pro- 
perly called chance. But when we allege that 
in a world of fixed sequences freedom finds 
room to work and the intervention of mind 
brings about results which would not other- 
wise occur, we do not imply that such inter- 
vention suspends in any wise the fixed se- 
quences. It has been the glorious work of 
determinism to demonstrate the invariability 
of their order ; of libertarianism to show how 
that invariability provides trustworthy tools 
for the coordinating mind of man. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 
I 

In declaring myself a libertarian, I by no 
means assert that everything I do is a free 
act and my freedom an affair altogether with- 
out bounds. Already I have said that, could 
it be proved that once since the universe be- 
gan a single being had on some occasion 
brought another influence to bear upon his 
conduct besides sequential causation, he would 
have established libertarianism. Determinism 
maintains that nothing but sequential causa- 
tion is possible. One instance to the contrary 
will destroy the doctrine as effectually as ten 
thousand. The questions of the possibility of 
freedom and of its scope are distinct. In 
championing freedom one need not allow it 
wide range. I believe that range to be ex* 
tremely small. Indeed, when I have fully set 
forth its restrictions, some readers may per- 
ceive little difference in practical result be- 
tween my libertarian doctrine and the deter- 



152 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

ministic. Determinism, in my judgment, is not 
something that may be lightly cast aside as 
intellectual rubbish, meaningless or outgrown. 
It never can be outgrown. It brings before 
us a body of important truths which every 
open-minded man must respect and adopt. 

We shall find it easiest to engraft that truth 
on libertarianism if now, after recognizing 
freedom as a power and one of another order 
than mechanical cause, we examine the varie- 
ties of limitation to which that power is ex- 
posed. I notice four. To each, for the sake of 
convenience in discussion, I give a name. 
They are the physical limitations, psycholog- 
ical limitations, voluntary limitations and ra- 
tional limitations, the four arranged here in 
the order of complex intelligibility. The dis- 
cussion of them, beginning with the simplest, 
will occupy this chapter and will carry us far 
toward the acceptance of a new species of 
necessity. 

ii 

That there are physical limitations is obvi- 
ous. A human being is not a pure spirit. With 
any such creature we have no acquaintance. 
Wherever we find personal power, it is attended 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 153 

with physical accompaniments ; and these, 
swayed by their own laws of causation, limit 
the scope of freedom. We inhabit a sequen- 
tial world where every antecedent is attached 
to a regular consequent. Undertaking to act in 
such a world, we must take its sequences into 
account. Our work will inevitably be futile 
if it is not put in the keeping of established 
agencies. 

As an architect, a new plan of construction 
strikes me. I have noticed that in lofty build- 
ings the lower parts are usually of nearly solid 
stone or brick. As the building rises, more 
windows are introduced ; and when it reaches 
the upper story, this is apt to be formed largely 
of glass. But this is to disregard convenience. 
My scheme shall follow exactly the opposite 
plan. Windows are made to look into, as well 
as out of. I will place them where people are. 
As we rise into the air, we do not need so 
many. Accordingly my lower story shall be 
almost wholly of glass. In the next I will have 
one third fewer windows; and so they shall 
gradually diminish, until at the top the wall 
may be nearly unbroken. That will be a 
thoroughly useful building. With this novel 
idea of structure I start my architectural career. 



154 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

But however good the idea, it will not work. 
Nature is against it. Her mandate on this sub- 
ject was issued long ago. She decided that in 
order to support weight there must be appro- 
priate props beneath, and that glass is not an 
appropriate prop. I can neither disregard this 
decision nor make it fit my plans. " Unless the 
Lord build the house, they labor in vain that 
build it." Of course in deflecting myself to 
accommodate Nature my architectural range is 
restricted. Yet only Nature can execute my 
plans. Into her hands I commit them, to be 
destroyed if she disapproves, to become solid 
if harmonious with her habits. Every free per- 
son, then, who will become strong must study 
elaborately the physical world and minutely 
adapt his schemes to its methods. It will be 
useless to reflect that mind is more powerful 
than matter, ideas of greater consequence than 
physical motions. Ideas cannot play as they 
will. We find ourselves in an already ordered 
universe and are bidden to respect its order. 
By ourselves we are impotent, while leagued 
with the powers of nature we have great allies. 
Such are our limitations when we attempt to 
carry our desires into the outer world. But 
there are certain other limitations of a physi- 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 155 

cal sort which press us even more closely. 
This body of mine, the means of conveying my 
ideals to the world beyond, is also subject to 
sequences which will not bend to right or left. 
It is for me to understand these laws of the 
body and to see that my ideals are fit for 
bodily cooperation. On the whole, then, so far 
from having an open and extensive territory 
throughout which my freedom may disport it- 
self, the scope of my conduct is rigidly re- 
stricted. Only such acts may go forth from 
me as will not jar against those which already 
have the right of way. 

in 

But we are hemmed in still further by what 
I have called psychological limitations. These 
point to conditions within our minds which 
have become fixed in the past and so bar our 
way to variety of conduct in the future. Such 
barriers appear early. When I first knew my- 
self I found myself equipped with many pre- 
ferred aptitudes. In a child's first year, even in 
his first months, we see that he possesses a 
character, i.e., a disposition to feel and act in 
regular ways. Where these pre-inclinations 
come from it is not necessary to examine here. 



156 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

Possibly they are reminiscences of ancestral 
conduct, possibly they attend jm peculiarities 
of physical structure. At any rate, there they 
are. We start our individual lives with a body 
of established habits. The determinist is not 
in error when he warns us that lines of fixed 
sequence similar to those we observe in the 
material world turn up in the mental also. And 
while habits may usually to a certain degree 
be changed, they do not give way easily. This 
is what makes a habit advantageous, that it 
runs like a machine, independent of conscious 
guidance, and always brings out one and the 
same single issue. 

When to these congenital habits we add the 
large number formed during conscious life, it 
becomes plain that to a large extent we are 
bound by our past. This binding may be help- 
ful or injurious; but whether the one or the 
other, it cuts into those dual possibilities which 
we found essential for freedom. Our future is 
less ambiguous than it would otherwise be, 
and through these habits our fellows are able 
to foretell our conduct much as they foretell 
the happenings of nature. When then we bestir 
ourselves for creative action, desirous of larger 
life, we often encounter an inner hampering 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 157 

character. The habits we accepted as our ser- 
vants have become our masters, and their 
power can be broken only by a long campaign 
during which we must sacrifice much which 
we would gladly gain. It is not necessary for 
me to dwell on this inner bondage to the past. 
For better or worse, all my readers have ex- 
perienced it. 

IV 

Hitherto I have been speaking as if freedom 
were a blessing never to be limited voluntarily, 
the reduction of it a calamity which must 
seriously impoverish us. This language I have 
used because I know it represents the mode of 
thinking of most of my readers, and I have 
wished to keep in their kind company as long 
as possible. But it does not state my own be- 
lief. On the contrary, I think the man unwise 
who is not continually cutting off sections of 
his freedom. The general discussion about 
freedom has been much confused by the popular 
fancy that freedom is something precious to 
which we must stoutly hold, resisting attempts 
of the thievish determinist to carry portions of 
it away. Such views of the value of freedom 
I do not share. While I cannot accept the 



158 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

deterministic belief that as a fact our conduct 
has from the beginning been controlled by our 
past, I come near to accepting that doctrine 
as a goal, as something in large measure de- 
sirable, as stated in an earlier chapter. I think 
it an important part of the business of life to 
reduce the range of freedom, which is confus- 
ingly broad in youth. This I have already 
urged, pointing out that the mature and power- 
ful person is not he who stands deliberating 
long. Far from it. Deliberation, ambiguity in 
regard to the future, usually indicates lack of 
acquaintance with the world in which we act. 
Through inexperience we are often forced to 
hesitate and, instead of acting, to try to dis- 
cover what circumstances signify. Or we are 
capriciously irresolute, turning to consider now 
this, now that, as if the situation were not 
familiar, as if a wise decision had never been 
reached before, or as if what formerly proved 
wise was so no longer. How much of life goes 
to waste through double-mindedness ! 

The wise man does not multiply occasions 
for deliberation. He studies a situation once 
or twice, tries the course which on the whole 
seems best and afterwards, perceiving at a 
glance whether the new circumstances sufli- 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 159 

ciently resemble the old, lets the old action take 
its appropriate course. Each of us attains his 
full strength only by mechanizing a large range 
of decisions. We establish sequential trains, see 
that they are adapted, even when unobserved, 
to further our ideals, and then leave them to 
themselves. Thus we voluntarily narrow our 
field of freedom in the interest of carrying out 
large ideals. Why should we worry ourselves 
with the guidance of conduct when purposes 
can be accomplished far more swiftly, accur- 
ately and with greater ease by turning them over 
to tested lines of automatism ? Accordingly I 
make up my mind once for all whether alcohol 
is a good thing or a bad, and do not every 
morning before going to breakfast examine 
the reasons for and against drinking it. That is 
settled ; and whichever way it is settled, my 
troublesome freedom of decision is thencefor- 
ward at an end. Possibly a majority of the 
situations of life may be thus surveyed, turned 
over to keepers, and removed from freedom's 
charge. Nothing of value is lost. Such a pro- 
cedure may even widen in some directions the 
field of freedom by opening new tracts for con- 
scious control, but it certainly also closes large 
tracts which were open before. Yet this is 



160 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

inevitable. It is the distinctive peculiarity of 
human action that it is continually adjusting 
a fixed and calculable past to a possible future. 
The broader that calculable past of ourselves 
becomes, the surer may be our command of 
the future. 

I insist on these voluntarily formed habits 
because they are among the most frequent 
and useful of all the restrictions put on freedom. 
By them the experiences we have had are 
swiftly applied to present needs. In chapter in 
we have seen how maturity is reached through 
their formation. Very properly we are of- 
fended when our conduct cannot be predicted 
and a friend does not know whether we shall 
tell the truth, be courteous to strangers, 
sagacious in business, or steadfast in political 
allegiance. Yet all this certitude indicates that 
what I have called single issues are counted 
more desirable than ambiguous futures. To 
gain efficient character we have given over 
certain sides of ourself to sequential causation, 
and this fact we wish to be understood and 
reckoned on as if it were a matter of nature 's 
ordinance. The loss of freedom here we do not 
think disparaging but honorable. Indeed each 
of the three sets of limitations thus far dis- 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 161 

cussed, while cutting off something of that 
freedom with which we imagine ourselves at 
first endowed, still opens a door to larger 
possibilities of conduct and enables us to co- 
ordinate it more widely than if such fixities did 
not exist. 



The fourth class of limitations, the moral 
ones, are more subtle and more open to doubt. 
If accepted, they will close most of the scanty 
room left to freedom. I have come so slowly 
to allow them a place that I will not require 
my reader to admit them rapidly. Let him use 
whatever freedom he supposes himself to pos- 
sess in rejecting them, the rest of my libertar- 
ian doctrine will still stand secure. 

Can we choose among ideals? According 
as we answer this question we accept or reject 
moral limitations. At first thought the answer 
would seem absurdly plain. Half an hour 
hence I may sleep, dine, play golf or make a 
call. Each of these ideal futures appears pos- 
sible and no one of them to be brought upon 
me as a sequent of past events. By all four I 
am invited, by none forced. But is my future 
quite so open as it looks? In deciding on a 



162 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

course, if we are wise, we take account of cir- 
cumstances and inquire what the situation it- 
self demands. Especially is this the case where 
a moral principle is involved. If the person on 
whom I might call is my sick mother, I do 
not feel quite free to sleep, dine, or play golf, 
to her neglect. We live encompassed by duties, 
each closing paths in otherwise attractive di- 
rections and making it untrue to say that 
many courses are in the same sense open. 
Duty restricts. Probably if we were altogether 
clear-sighted, we should see in each situation 
of life a single course to which duty summons 
and should understand that freedom is not 
equally distributed over the entire field. Onco 
becoming for example the treasurer of a cor- 
poration, I am obliged to ask myself before 
every act, " What under present circumstances 
should the treasurer do?" and that fit course 
is so authoritative as to cut off the fullness of 
freedom elsewhere. 

Nor let it be replied that duty does not 
diminish freedom, since its laws differ from 
those of the physical world in that they may 
be disobeyed. Disobeyed they may be, but at 
a loss no less considerable than when we dash 
ourselves against nature's ordinances. If I 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 163 

violate laws of nutrition, I incur pangs of indi- 
gestion. Violating a law of duty, I do not so 
directly expose myself to the contrariety of 
nature, but I assault that network of human 
relations on which I myself depend and so 
deal a savage blow to my own being. Sin is 
self-contradictory, a mode of action disorgan- 
izing to all human life which it touches. So 
long as honesty is the expression of those 
human understandings through which each 
man is least hampered, can calculate best on 
his neighbor's conduct, and most securely direct 
his own, he who seeks the largest freedom com- 
patible with human society will seek to main- 
tain it. But in doing so he must abandon am- 
biguous futures and accept at each step of 
action a prescribed single issue. Moral choices 
therefore do not present a multiplicity of 
ideals among which I am equally free to follow 
which I will. They are hedged about with 
obstacles restricting freedom in all directions 
but one. While it is true I am not compelled 
to choose as duty bids, my only alternative is 
some sort of disruption of myself. We state 
the matter epigrammatically by saying that in 
cases of moral conduct there remains to us 
only the freedom of suicide. One clear course, 



164 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

could I but find it, will keep me harmonious 
with myself and society. Other courses, and 
they are undoubtedly open to me, will lead to 
some form of self-destruction. To whatever 
extent then we turn from the one fixed path 
of duty, we abandon rational causation and 
let ourselves be driven by the sequent forces 
of nature. There are not, we have seen, alter- 
native rational ideals. No reasoner has many 
sound conclusions among which to choose ; he 
either hits the valid one or falls into error. 
But if this view is correct, 7 and in moral 
matters the right is always single while self- 
conflicting error is manifold, the principle will 
also have a certain application in provinces not 
usually reckoned moral. In undertakings re- 
quiring skill we regularly assume that there 
is a best way and many haphazard ways. The 
child adopts whichever comes to hand; the 
man of sagacity searches long to find what 
the situation rather than his own whim re- 
quires. To this he feels himself confined and 
understands that anything else will lead to the 
destruction of his ideals. A narrow freedom 
therefore usually attends wide vision. A great 
statesman, merchant, inventor or chess-player 
sees but one thing to do where the amateur 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 165 

sees a dozen. Especially in the Fine Arts what 
is done by the master appears to us beholders, 
as to himself, inevitable. Its inevitability makes 
it resemble a thing of nature and we cannot 
think how it could be other than it is. Sharp 
moral limitations ever attend freedom, and 
these we cannot disregard without exposing 
our conduct to whatever bit of non-purposive 
causation happens to be in our neighbor- 
hood. 

These teleologic linkages, too, are held by 
many, and I agree with them, to be no less 
closely knit than are the mechanical, different 
though the two types of connection are. The 
formula of the one is " in order to," of the 
other "because of" ; yet the latter, or antese- 
quential connections, are not on that account 
looser than the sequential. I go home to go 
to bed ; to bed in order to sleep ; to sleep for 
vigor; I seek vigor for writing; and I write 
in order to express myself and to make my 
special contribution to the welfare of man- 
kind. Purpose flows from purpose as inevit- 
ably as force from force, though in reverse 
order, until all find ultimate justification in 
the twofold aim of benefit to ourself and our 
neighbor. This is the summum bonum. All 



166 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

else becomes good through relation to this. 
Either this directs our course throughout the 
entire line, or nature takes us in charge. Com- 
mitting ourselves to the mechanical order* 
each further step is sequentially necessitated. 
But it is no less necessitated in the teleologi- 
cal order. The determinist is right. In either 
order, no freedom is discoverable. But he is 
wrong in supposing that freedom therefore 
ceases. We are free to choose between the 
two necessities, we have the liberty of suicide. 
Following the antesequential order, where 
present purpose is induced by future purpose, 
we enter on a course where personal life con- 
tinually enlarges. Adopting any act not 
prompted by this forward-looking causal tie, 
we fall into the order of things and are de- 
termined by the same laws as they. Because 
we can choose between these two necessities, 
we are free. 

VI 

Summing up now the results of this chap- 
ter, we have seen that libertarians distinguish 
sharply between the fact of freedom and its 
extent. That fact remains assured even when 
reduced to the slender proportions in which I 



THE LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM 167 

figure it, confined to a mere alternative be- 
tween life and death, all on each side being 
thenceforth determined. Even then a dual 
possibility is ever before us and the single is- 
sue of the detenninist is banished. But such 
libertarians as deny moral limitations, and who 
would count me half a detenninist, still ac- 
knowledge the reality and importance of those 
voluntary and pyschological restrictions which 
through habits, formed consciously or found 
directing our minds as soon as conscious- 
ness begins, cut off large tracts of freedom 
in the interest of efficiency. All see, too, that 
the habits of the world around us, which we 
call laws of nature, are negative conditions of 
whatever we do. There is much common 
ground therefore between libertarians and de- 
terminists, and the amount of it steadily in- 
creases. Only libertarians do not, like their 
opponents, put this restrictive matter in the 
foreground. That, however, is its proper place. 
Accordingly every age has been deeply in- 
debted to those calling themselves now neces- 
sarians, now determinists, for forcing these 
limitations on its attention. More important 
is it to remember them than to dwell on the 
empty fact of freedom. Yet that freedom, 



168 THE PBOBLEM OF FREEDOM 

however meagre, still remains. Not to take it 
into account renders human life incompre- 
hensible. To take it alone into account leaves 
human life trivial. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE MYSTERIES OF FREEDOM 
I 

The last half of this book has been de- 
voted to examining difficulties. In the first 
half a positive doctrine of freedom was laid 
down, at least in outline. Determinism and 
libertarianism were compared, with the re- 
sult that the latter appeared to be the more 
largely inclusive. With it, therefore, lay the 
presumption of truth. But to establish that 
truth it became necessary to search out ob- 
jections, enter into them sympathetically, and 
see whether they most naturally admit a lib- 
ertarian answer. Thus far I believe they do. 
In my judgment the difficulties hitherto dis- 
cussed, so threatening as to lead many candid 
minds to reject the doctrine of freedom alto- 
gether, owe their seeming gravity to a hasty 
and erroneous understanding of what freedom 
involves. 

But that is not the case with two which 
remain. For them I do not find explanation. 



17Q THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

Real difficulties they are, affecting the very 
foundation of our doctrine; yet when I try to 
remove them, I cannot. My knowledge falls 
short before they disappear. Darkness lies over 
their neighborhood, and I have to acknowledge 
myself face to face with mysteries. Mysteries 
are disagreeable things, though probably un- 
avoidable for the limited mind of man. When 
we approach one of these puzzling matters, 
which has bewildered the ages, our proper 
course is first entire frankness and then a 
serious effort to mark out precisely where the 
center of the difficulty lies. A mystery recon- 
noitered, hedged in, and confined to a single 
spot, loses much of its power to harm. 

II 

In the preceding chapter we saw that the 
scope of freedom is probably confined to a 
choice between two necessities. Throughout 
our world of time and space runs one necessity, 
sequential, impersonal, binding each success- 
ive event to fixed antecedents and allowing 
it to contain nothing more than it has thus re- 
ceived. But there emerges also a personal an- 
tesequential necessity in which, no less tightly, 
purpose hinges on purpose, each subordinate 



THE MYSTERIES OF FREEDOM 171 

ideal deriving its existence and value from an 
ideal superior to itself. The least departure 
from this ideal order throws us over into the 
contrasted type. Accordingly, it is open to us 
to guide our conduct as personal beings or, 
partially abandoning that personality, to fall 
off into a condition of thinghood, there to be 
moved by impersonal forces. But why should 
we ever do so? Why commit suicide? If per- 
sonal life is open to me and what occurs may 
bear the impress of my purpose, what should 
induce me to abandon purpose and allow 
myself to float upon circumstance. Why let 
environment overrun me when I can rule it by 
laying hold on a possible future good, tightly 
ordered though this is? Why, in short, does 
one ever sin, assaulting the law of his own 
nature and submitting himself to alien lord- 
ship? 

That is a question I cannot answer, though 
it is one which presses libertarianism hard. 
The facts are plain. I notice it myself, and 
hear it reported by others, that when we might 
have guided our lives toward approved ideals, 
thus enlarging our powers, we grew slack and 
let ourselves be swept along by impulse, en- 
vironment, the happenings of the hour, and 



172 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

so became more and more creatures of nature. 
But why? I do not know and, worse still, I 
do not see how anybody can know, increase 
knowledge as we may. Probably on reflection 
we shall see that we are asking a question in- 
susceptible of answer. For this is the situa- 
tion : two lines of operation open before us, 
one moving in rational order, directed by 
ideals of future worth, the other irrational, im- 
pelled by the adhesive forces of the past. We 
can ally ourselves with either. To ask why we 
take the irrational is then obviously absurd. 
No reason can be given for irrationality. 
Could one be given, unreason would be turned 
into reason and the seemingly suicidal act be- 
come life-giving. Sin cannot then be intellig- 
ently stated. It springs from an unintelligent 
side of our nature. We can merely acknowledge 
the miserable fact. Here we are denizens of 
two worlds, in either of which we may abide. 
In the lower we do not realize our prerogative 
as persons. And why stop short ? Because 
suicide is possible ; because every rational be- 
ing is capable of irrationality. But this con- 
veys no explanation. Even to demand explan- 
ation is itself irrational. 
n While then there is unquestionable mystery 



TEE MYSTERIES OF FREEDOM 173 

here, I do not see that it has a more adverse 
bearing on my theory than on any other. Un- 
less we altogether deny the reality of sin, that 
mystery remains. It is true denial has been 
attempted, but I believe it has not satisfied 
mankind. All are too distinctly aware of having 
done avoidable wrong. Every one of us re- 
calls occasions when he acted unworthily and, 
perceiving what was the reasonable thing to 
do, did not do it. Explanation through denial 
has therefore never been widely accepted. I 
certainly cannot accept it. I think we recog- 
nize more truth by confessing the possibility 
of self-contradiction, though this is not pos- 
sible everywhere. If, as we have suspected, 
brutes act only through sequential impulse, 
then they are never irrational because they 
never are rational. They do not come into tho 
region of ends, purposes, antesequential cau- 
sation, and accordingly cannot sin. Only he 
who possesses reason can disregard it. Ac- 
knowledging this first difficulty, then, I merely 
mark out the field where it lies, without at- 
tempting explanation. Sin, I believe, does oc- 
cur; yet to look for further light upon it 
would involve us in the absurdity of seeking 
a reason for unreason. 



174 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

in 

But another trouble remains, about as mys- 
terious. Let us feel its full stress. We have 
seen that the physical world, and to a large 
extent the mental, is tightly locked together 
in sequential causation. A personal form of 
causation has also appeared in which we are 
not bound by a fixed past, but have access par- 
tially at least to a possible future. Out into 
what is not yet actual my thought travels and 
from it derives strength to change the past. 
Mind, therefore, through forecast and imagin- 
ation is able to guide the material order. 

But how is this guiding accomplished? 
Through coordination, we said. It is the office 
of mind to bring together lines of natural se- 
quence and to adjust coincidence among them. 
This is antesequential causation. An object 
moves past me. Desiring to examine it, I pict- 
ure my hand grasping it. Holding attention 
on this ideal act, I immediately see my hand 
go forth and precisely hit the object. And 
what are the steps in the marvelous process ? 
How did I cross from the ideal, a purely men- 
tal affair, to that physical tug of the muscle ? 
What is the bridge between the two? Or 



THE MYSTERIES OF FREEDOM 175 

using our former technical terms, at what point 
does antesequential causation connect with 
sequential? The two cannot run in altogether 
independent lines, for it is in supposed defer- 
ence to antesequential ideals that the sequen- 
tial diverges from what would otherwise occur. 
And when does the latter bend to that intel- 
ligent bidding, and how and why? That is 
what we would all most like to know. We are 
puzzled to see how anything so unlike material 
conditions as a thought can influence them. 
Contemplating the great gulf between the con- 
trasted sides of the world we must wonder 
whether it ever can be crossed. Yet if it can- 
not, what is freedom or what the function of 
ideals ? 

Here is a second problem which I cannot 
solve. I do not know how these ideals of ours 
get their clutch on events. I cannot trace their 
exit, observing them go forth to mingle first 
with bodily conditions and then with those 
of the material world beyond. The point of 
contact escapes me. I must acknowledge then 
a large defect in my doctrine of freedom. How 
a person, even if free, ever does anything, 
passes my comprehension. 

Yet here once more the immensity of the 



176 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

problem saves me from despair ; for the diffi- 
culty besets all theories alike, is as puzzling 
to the determinist as to the libertarian, and 
no more so to either than to him who despises 
both. What we here encounter is the general 
problem of the relation of mind and body — 
an unescapable fact, an insoluble enigma. 
Whether we approach mind from the side of 
matter, or matter from the side of mind, we 
pass into equal darkness. I hold the watch 
before me. The light reflected from its dial 
agitates the nerves of my eye. Through still 
more inward nerves the agitation penetrates 
to the brain, producing its small motions there, 
and then I think of the dial. But what is 
that " then " ? Physical motions, light-waves, 
changes in nerves, in brain fibres, become at a 
certain point transformed into thought. What 
was the bridge connecting incoming motion 
with representing idea? Nobody knows, nor 
knows any better if we reverse the process. I 
form a purpose of removing my watch from the 
table. To effect it my hand must be engaged. 
On that outstretching hand I fix attention, and 
the hand begins to move, the watch with it. 
But, here again we are unable to mark the 
connecting bridge between initiating idea and 



THE MYSTERIES OF FREEDOM 111 

subsequent motion. Over this bridge we are 
crossing every instant of our lives, yet no man 
has ever caught sight of it. 

How do the psychologists manage the mat- 
ter which embarrasses their descriptive work 
as badly as it does our ethical? They give it 
a name and pass it by, as we too must do. 
For that is what the doctrine of parallelism 
amounts to. It is a neat label pasted over 
human ignorance, stating the little that we 
know and declining to state more. There is 
perfect parallel action, it asserts, between mind 
and body. Whenever a change occurs in bodily 
conditions, one occurs in mental ; and when- 
ever one occurs in mental, in the bodily also 
there is change. But this does not oblige us 
to hold that the mind influences the body, or 
the body the mind. The notion of interactive 
causality may be omitted. That falls outside 
our knowledge. We detect no power passing 
from one side to the other. Concomitant 
change is all we observe, and the scientific 
man wisely confines himself within the field 
of his experience. Parallelism he can perceive, 
mutual influence he cannot; he therefore makes 
continual use of the former and leaves the 
latter undetermined. Whether bodily changes 



178 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

in any way affect the mind he neither asserts 
nor denies. Of course in popular phraseology 
there is no harm in saying that the stab of a 
pin produced pain, or that I held my hand still 
intentionally. It greatly abbreviates conversa- 
tion to speak in terms of mutual influence, and 
interaction rather than parallelism will always 
shape the language of the street. But we must 
not assume that these conveniences of speech 
represent verified knowledge. A fundamental 
ignorance attends us, and the doctrine of 
parallelism is the best mode of holding the 
problem in suspense. 

If, then, no one is at present in condition to 
say how body and mind communicate, it surely 
cannot be urged against libertarianism that it 
leaves the point unexplained. Of course it 
does, but its failure brings no more reproach 
on itself than on science in general. Nor is 
this state of ignorance practically embarrass- 
ing. It does not prevent the determinist from 
saying that our ideals are largely controlled 
by circumstance, nor need it prevent the liber- 
tarian from saying that circumstance is largely 
controlled by our ideals. Whatever meaning 
attaches to " control " in the one case attaches 
to it in the other* For complete understanding 



THE MYSTERIES OF FREEDOM 179 

no doubt libertarianism and determinism alike 
require proof that things and persons interact. 
But since such proof is lacking, both may 
tolerably content themselves by noticing that 
events happen precisely as they would were 
such interaction present. As a libertarian I 
find my ideals followed by appropriate changes, 
however these are induced, and that is all that 
is necessary to insure my freedom. Gladly 
would I understand what makes things so 
curiously attend on my commands ; but after 
all, the important matter is that they do thus 
attend. Parallelism no less than interaction 
assures me that what I intend will come to 
pass. 

But a word of warning is needed here : who- 
ever accepts parallelism should take the doc- 
trine whole-heartedly. Pretty commonly natu- 
ralists work it only from a single side. We 
are told that mental changes wait on physical 
changes and that, therefore, we persons are 
subject to the material world. Undoubtedly. 
But that is only half the story. The thorough- 
going parallelist must recognize a not inferior 
correspondence in the opposite direction. Every 
ideal has its appropriate bodily change. This 
psychologists are apt to overlook and easily 



180 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

slip into determinism through taking it for 
granted that a start must always be made 
from the physical side. But that is to beg the 
entire question. Parallelism itself suggests 
nothing of the sort. So long as men play fair 
with the doctrine of parallelism, it will contain 
no terrors for libertarians, 

IV 

So much then needed to be said about the 
strange perversity of men in destroying them- 
selves and about their equally strange invasion 
of a non-personal world. These two deeds are 
the standing mysteries of freedom. That liber- 
tarianism admits acts so inexplicable has always 
made it obnoxious to minds that love lucidity. 
I would not conceal or attenuate either diffi- 
culty. Both are real and serious. Nobody can 
approach libertarianism without soon encount- 
ering them and at the last he will not succeed 
in setting them aside. Yet that they do not 
prevent our accepting the doctrine, I firmly 
hold. For though they are mysteries, they 
are mysteries of universal human nature and 
hence unavoidable. They always attend us 
openly or covertly, no matter what philosophi- 
cal creed we adopt. Persons, we must own, 



THE MYSTERIES OF FREEDOM 181 

are mysterious creatures. To attempt to be 
altogether lucid in regard to them is generally 
equivalent to refusing to see in their acts 
more than we find in the motions of material 
things. Indeed our whole controversy about 
freedom runs down in the last analysis to the 
question already discussed of what constitutes 
a person. Socrates held that ethics is only an 
expansion of the precept " know thyself," and 
most students of the subject since have agreed 
that on the question of the self all else turns. 
The determinist sees in each self or person 
just what he sees in any other receptive object, 
a centre where many forces cross, checking, 
intensifying, neutralizing or transforming one 
another without loss or addition. The liber- 
tarian detects in that coordinating centre a 
fresh creative power contrasted in kind with 
the other agencies which meet together there. 
To trace these more ultimate metaphysical 
implications of the two creeds would, however, 
carry us far afield. I can merely indicate here 
how wide a parting of the ways is made by 
the adoption of the one or the other mental 
attitude. 



CHAPTER X 

VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 
I 

A few qualifications remain. To secure 
clearness I have unduly simplified certain 
contrasted types of belief. The course of a 
necessarily complicated argument could best 
be followed by having a clean-cut naturalistic 
doctrine arrayed against an equally clean-cut 
humanistic. I have accordingly set up two 
figures of " the determinist " and " the liber- 
tarian/' and allowed them to fight the matter 
out between them. But these figures are 
largely fictitious ; at least in gaining precision 
by their means I have obscured existing vari- 
eties of belief. There is no one doctrine of 
either freedom or determinism. Each presents 
diversities. Over and above those which 
spring from the nature of the subject are 
those grounded in the multiplicity of human 
temperaments. Coleridge imagined that every 
man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian. 
But there are cross divisions. Some Platonize 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 183 

in Aristotelic fashion, and some who follow 
Aristotle in general prefer Plato as their 
guide in certain exalted regions. 

So it has happened with those who think 
on freedom. They think in widely different 
and not always consistent fashions. Of any 
given opponent of freedom it can usually be 
said merely that he is more or less determin- 
istic or that his determinism is more or less 
extreme. Opinions about freedom are difficult 
to detach from other interests. Whatever doc- 
trine is announced will be sure to bear marks 
of the individual mind of him who offers it. 
I have heartily accepted this state of things 
for myself, defending my belief against all 
comers, assured that in doing so I should also 
incidentally give their beliefs a hearing. But 
since on each side of the question the varieties 
of opinion converge toward several fairly 
marked types, I have thought it well to as- 
semble these systematically in this concluding 
chapter, to pass them successively in review, 
explaining what in each prevents me from ac- 
cepting it in place of the theory I have ad- 
vocated. 



184 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

II 

The varieties of determinism need not de- 
tain us long. I have already indicated them 
in my second chapter. The extreme form 
among them is necessarianism, fatalism, or, 
in theological language, predestination, where 
all conduct is conceived as regulated from 
without, directed by that which pays no at- 
tention to character or desire. This ancient 
belief we have seen to be at present univers- 
ally repudiated. Even in a law-abiding world 
character counts. Through it law moves as 
readily as through other material. A reckon- 
ing of the factors in any action would need, 
therefore, to notice not merely circumstances 
but the human beings whom these encircle. 
Environment and the person environed are so 
related that it is folly to represent the former 
as having a constant nature apart from the 
latter. The two factors interact, so that what 
looks like the same situation discloses divers- 
ity if occupied by diverse persons. Of two 
men meeting a bear, one finds him terrific, in- 
ducing flight, the other inspiriting, inducing 
attack. Neither then should be said to be di- 
rected by circumstances, but by circumstances 



VARIETIES OF DOCTBIKE 185 

plus character. So at least the modern doctrine 
asserts, though wide differences arise among 
determinists as they attach greater or less 
consequence to the two contrasted factors. 

Whether the modified formula relieves 
conduct of the mechanical rigidity obnoxious 
in necessarianism I have doubted. If my 
present desire and purpose are altogether con- 
trolled by those which preceded, the inner 
life is as inevitable as the outer and the oper- 
ations of my character no less fated than 
those of planetary motion. If we understand 
character to include future possibilities to- 
gether with past realities, we speak the lan- 
guage of libertarianism. The point of interest 
in the whole controversy is whether a new 
event ever occurs, whether divergence is con- 
ceivable from lines already laid down, whether 
man has any true creative power. A consist- 
ent determinist should deny all this as stoutly 
as ever a necessarian did. What has been will 
be, he should say, and that alone. If seeming 
change occurs, it is only in seeming. Forms 
alter, but the promise and potency of all that 
can happen is already provided at the begin- 
ning. What this means it is not easy to un- 
derstand. If what has been controls what 



186 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

shall be, one would think it would control its 
seemings and its form no less than its other 
features. But evidently within the general 
compass of determinism there is room for a 
considerable range of opinions, and writers of 
this type are no more consistent or thorough- 
going than those of contrasted tendencies. 

• in 

The varieties of libertarianism are harder 
to trace, not merely as being more numerous 
but because they generally turn on subtler 
distinctions. Those of a quantitative sort are 
simple enough however. While all libertar- 
ians recognize that freedom is in some degree 
restricted by conditions of the past, they nat- 
urally differ much as regards the scope of 
that restriction. Few set the limit where I do, 
confining choice to an alternative between two ( 
organized necessities. Most writers allow a 
larger element of caprice. Extreme libertar- 
ianism, in the form known as the freedom of 
indifference, makes caprice its essential prin- 
ciple. We are free only when there is nothing 
to induce us to take one course rather than 
another. If act A seems in any respect more 
attractive than act B, then to that extent I 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 187 

am not free in choosing it. I am under some 
compulsion, impulsion at least. Complete free- 
dom involves complete detachment. Causa- 
tion of every kind must be absent. Course A 
I might take ; yes, but I equally well might 
take B. Dual possibilities are before me, one 
precisely as devoid of inducement as the 
other. To stand in absolute freedom, my 
future should be ambiguous through and 
through. It has been maintained that we pos- 
sess such freedom and find ourselves from 
time to time in situations where our choice is 
dictated by nothing but arbitrary will. It 
would be nonsensical to ask why in such a 
case we did the deed. There was no " why." 
We simply did it, were altogether creative, 
might just as well have done anything else. 

Such is libertarianism at its extreme, the so- 
called liberty of indifference. It would be dif- 
ficult to find an advocate of it to-day, though 
determinists often put it forward as the only 
alternative to their doctrine. Indeed unin- 
structed and partisan determinists are apt 
enough to speak of the whole doctrine of 
libertarianism as indeterminism, showing how 
little acquaintance they have with any other 
form than that which denies motivation to 



188 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

action. No doubt, too, in the vague mind of 
the community fancies like this, uncriticized, 
unstated even, play a considerable part ; while 
often a hot advocate of freedom, heedless of 
the boundaries of his doctrine, takes no pains 
to guard it on this its foolish side. But it should 
be the first duty of every believer in freedom 
to see that he is relying on nothing so fantas- 
tic and contradictory as this. 

How unlike it my own doctrine is will 
readily be recalled. I have pointed out that 
while the kinds of causation are twofold, 
reasons and forces, human actions are no 
more destitute of causes than are physical 
motions. Wherever reason has not prompted 
my taking a given course, a force has. Rea- 
sons, or antesequential causes, are linked in a 
determined order. Whenever I do not adhere 
to them, or in any wise distort that order, 
natural forces invade me with their sequential 
tide. Agencies out of the past take then the 
place which might have been occupied by 
previsions of the future. There is accordingly 
no room for a freedom of indifference. Indeed 
when that extravagant faith is scrutinized I 
believe it will be found to be practically iden- 
tical with its extreme opponent, necessarian- 



VARIETIES OF DOCTBINE 189 

ism. It is no accident that the two have dis- 
appeared from ethical controversy together. 
Let us consider their relationship. 

According to the doctrine of necessity 
every one of us is under the entire control 
of circumstance, while, if we possess the free- 
dom of indifference, we are entirely cut loose 
from circumstance, dwelling apart where no- 
thing can influence us. No two doctrines 
could at first sight appear more contrasted. 
Yet on reflection it will be seen that there is 
only a difference of emphasis between them. 
Under the view of necessity the will or person 
amounts to nothing. It is not a true factor. 
We go through the motions of willing, imag- 
ine we are managing something, but are in 
reality ourselves managed by outward fate. 
The little inner strivings which we call will 
make a pretty show, but are merely collateral 
phenomena attending that which would have 
been precisely the same had they never oc- 
curred. Necessarianism presents us with a 
will that wills nothing, while the liberty of 
indifference offers one that wills nothing. That 
is the only distinction. Under the liberty of 
indifference I may just as well will B as A. I 
have no more interest in the one than in the 



190 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

other. To my mind they are equally good, or 
equally bad. Neither has any distinctive worth. 
Each is but a zero. The will therefore wills 
nothing at all. But that was precisely what, 
with a difference of emphasis, necessarianism 
asserted. Both then must be right or neither, 
and I have said that no sincere writer to-day 
advocates either. Real progress is made in the 
ancient controversy when it is once perceived 
that there is no longer matter for disputation 
in necessarianism or in the liberty of indiffer- 
ence. Each of these may unconsciously sway 
our thinking, and each will always retain a 
value as the ultimate goal to which humanis- 
tic or naturalistic thought might conceivably 
be carried. But as approved and combative 
beliefs both have disappeared. 

IV 

Another frequent notion of freedom which 
seems to me largely fictitious is that which 
goes under the name of the liberty of self- 
determination. It makes a sharp distinction 
between persons and things in this respect, 
that persons are autonomous or self-directed, 
things heteronomous or directed by something 
else. Of course this does not mean that free 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 191 

persons do not traffic with things, that they 
hold aloof and work each his private enginery. 
Anything like this would he plainly impossi- 
ble. It is merely meant that for persons the 
spring of action is within themselves and that 
they need not borrow prompting power from 
the world around. They are individuals in a 
sense that nothing else is. To their own pur- 
poses they may be true and they possess the 
ability to detach themselves from whatever is 
incongruous with these. 

In all this I see a certain truth, and even a 
practical usefulness. Yet I believe it obscures, 
if it does not omit, the essential elements of 
freedom. At best it indicates merely that 
negative freedom, or absence of alien inter- 
ference, which I mentioned in my illustration 
of the pendulum in chapter I. The serious 
problem of freedom is not concerned with the 
question whether causation comes from within 
or without, but what is its character and 
whether it expresses a closed past or an o pen 
future. Kant well marks the illusory nature of 
this freedom of inner motivation by his illus- 
tration of the roasting-jack. This consists of 
a spit with a spring attached through whose 
gradual pressure meat may turn before the 



192 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

fire without the care of an attendant. Because 
all the moving power of the roasting-jack is 
contained within it, it does not become free, nor 
would it be free even if its spring were of 
some magic sort which never ran down. At 
every moment only a single issue is open to it. 
Its inner established nature restricts it as 
closely as any outer dictation. In order to be 
free, something more is needed than an unim- 
peded internal constitution. That constitution 
must be incomplete, possessing unrealized 
possibilities, by whose aid it is capable of 
modifying its own past. No such power is in- 
volved in the absence of alien interference, 
nor can the notion of self-determination ever 
be an adequate statement of freedom. Free- 
dom certainly is this, but it is more than this. 
"-— A still more trivial kind of freedom, closely 
allied to the preceding, is that which I will 
call the freedom of Ji£tion. Its adherents 
hold that all we mean by freedom is an ability 
to act or not to act according as we choose or 
will. Here freedom refers entirely to the going 
forth of purpose and not at all to its forma- 
tion. Unless a clear distinction is drawn be- 
tween what I please and what I would do, the 
statement becomes circular ; and it certainly 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 193 

puts forward as the point of importance the 
obscurest feature of volition, the connection 
between the inner and the outer world. All 
inquiry about the origin of that which is to be 
sent forth is omitted, though this is generally 
assumed to be sequentially induced. The doc- 
trine then is only nominally libertarian. It 
was introduced into English thought by 
Locke, but is too insignificant to call for ex- 
tended remark. 



A doctrine deserving more careful attention 
is that of rational freedom. It has had a long 
and useful career, first under the ancient 
Stoics and recently among the followers of 
Kant and Hegel. These idealistic writers ac- 
knowledge a natural order everywhere, just 
as I have maintained, a natural order of 
sequence. But they point out that man is not 
a creature of nature, that his actions may be 
regulated in a different way, a special type of 
causation being open to him as a person. 
This is that which I have spoken of as ante- 
sequential causation. They call it rational 
causation, an excellent descriptive term. Ra- 
tional causation is distinctive of persons, 



194 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

natural causation of things. Freedom indic- 
ates our personal detachment. When we call 
a man free, we emphasize his personality, de- 
claring that he is no longer subject to blind 
forces but is capable of coordinating values, 
of adjusting the inferior in deference to de- 
mands of the superior. That sort of antese- 
quential necessity, in which I expressed my 
belief in the last chapter, where each little end 
gets its character and cogency from its ser- 
vice to a more inclusive end, is what these 
writers and I understand by rational causation ; 
and this is what they mean by freedom too. 
Freedom and the rational life are identical. 

" He is the freeman whom the truth makes free 
And none is free beside." 

Rationality then being what constitutes per- 
sons, these writers have little to say about sin. 
If it exists, it is a mistake, an error of judg- 
ment. My range of knowledge being limited, 
again and again when seeking a good I do not 
notice that what I accept as such is in reality 
not related to that larger whole which erron- 
eously made it desirable in my eyes. The cure 
then for sin is knowledge, a broader contact 
with total reality. In us reason is partial. In 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 195 

the world at large it works on a great scale. 
Behind all things and lending them their 
worth there is personal life appealing to onr 
personal life. Keason calls to reason, and 
every one of us maintains himself as a person 
through loyalty to that reason which he ac- 
cepts but does not make. 

Is not this the very doctrine which I have 
been urging ? No, there is an important dif- 
ference. This theory identifies that rational 
action, on which I too have laid stress, with 
freedom itself. Here freedom applies to the 
matter chosen ; not, as with me, to the manner 
of choosing. Accordingly in this freedom dual 
possibility disappears. These writers elimin- 
ate that. They do not recognize what I have 
called the freedom of suicide. They assume 
that because rationality is necessary for a 
person, he cannot cease to be rational. But 
he can, through ceasing to be a person. 
To an antesequential mode of action he is 
unfortunately not confined. Though reason 
is his prerogative, irrationality is open to him. 
And precisely in settling this dual possibility, 
of personality or irrationality, does freedom 
consist. To connect it with one side alone, re- 
fusing it to the other, strips it of meaning. 



196 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

Yet though these writers are as rigidly de- 
terministic as the materialists themselves — on 
opposite grounds — and understand by free- 
dom nothing like what it means in the mouth of 
ordinary men, the term becomes with them a 
peculiarly sacred and frequent one. They use 
it continually to mark the presence of intel- 
ligence everywhere. With them sin, evil, me- 
chanism, blind force, individual existence even, 
are temporary and provisional aspects of a 
universe whose reality is freedom or rational 
order. To call any being spiritual and to call 
it free are one and the same thing ; and at 
bottom all being is spiritual. In the view of 
the absolute, disorder is impossible. In spite 
then of their brandishing the term freedom 
somewhat conspicuously, I cannot see how these 
writers can be reckoned libertarians. Yet if 
determinists, they are such in so peculiar a 
sense that they need a special designation. I 
shall call them Idealistic Determinists. 

VI 

Perhaps a brief consideration should be 
given hereto Henry Sidg wick's contention that 
the issues between libertarianism and determ- 
inism are insoluble and unimportant. In his 



VABIETIES OF DOCTRINE 197 

Method of Ethics he has maintained that 
each of these beliefs can furnish demonstrable 
evidence for itself and finds its only weakness 
in the equally strong though incompatible 
proof of the opposing doctrine. He also holds 
that the acceptance or rejection of either will 
make no practical difference in our lives. To 
the first point this book, so far as it convinces, 
will be a sufficient answer. Its theory of free- 
dom provides room I believe for every rational 
factor of determinism. All that remains then 
is to learn whether the subject of freedom 
stands so aloof from the rest of existence that 
changing our belief about it would change 
nothing else. I cannot think so. Each of the 
two beliefs seems to me to bear large conse- 
quences in its train. A man's whole outlook 
must vary as he takes his stand at one or the 
other point of view. Of course nobody is al- 
together consistent. Without noticing our use 
of incongruous material, most of us do in 
practice mingle conceptions of the two oppos- 
ing types, still imagining ourselves libertarians 
or determinists as the one or the other name 
has for us the more honorable associations. 
Between such hazy thinkers there may indeed 
be little perceptible difference. But that is be- 



198 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

cause the thinkers are negligible, not that the 
subject is so. What we wish to learn is whether 
certain consequences affecting life attach them- 
selves logically to one of these doctrines and do 
not belong to the other. I notice several such. 

Already it has been pointed out that where 
only a single issue is open regret loses its sig- 
nificance and shrinks to a sense of misfortune. 
To most of us the belief that something else 
was possible is the distinctive mark of regret. 
Perhaps this belief is erroneous, as determin- 
ism declares. But it certainly is erroneous to 
say that its presence or absence makes no dif- 
ference in the complexion of our lives. Al- 
ready a changing belief in the libertarian no- 
tions of regret has worked a great, and in 
many respects a beneficent, change in the 
public estimate of crime. 

So too in responsibility, another special 
form of praise and blame, some divergent 
effects are observable. Libertarians are always 
insisting that responsibility disappears when 
dual possibilities cease. How can I, they ask, 
be held responsible for what under the circum- 
stances I could not fail to do? The act was 
not mine. It really belonged to whatever re- 
strictive influence brought it about. If my 



VABIETIES OF DOCTRINE 199 

father trained me to steal and carefully se- 
cluded me from hearing any condemnation of 
such practices, then he is responsible for what 
look like my misdeeds. They are not mine but 
are really, no matter what the law may say, de- 
rived from him. Through me they simply pass, 
as does sound through a telegraph wire. A 
piece of conduct cannot be called mine till 
among many courses open to me I give it the 
stamp of my preference. All this is denied by 
determinists, who hold on the contrary that 
freedom conceived in the libertarian sense 
quite abolishes responsibility. Continuity be- 
tween past and present is gone. Yesterday I 
chose A; to-day under similar circumstances, 
its opposite, B. Between the two there is no 
connection. In what sense, then, can it be said 
that it was I, the same being, who performed 
the two acts ? The very notion of a responsible 
selfhood implies some sort of connecting bond 
uniting the actor of to-day with him of yester- 
day. And such a connecting bond determin- 
ism has in that body of compulsive experience 
which each of us receives from his past. So 
long as the new springs directly from the old, 
it may well be chargeable with acts that have 
gone before. But introduce a will able at any 



200 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

minute to break its allegiance to the past, and 
all hold for responsibility is gone. Evidently 
determinists and libertarians, if they take 
their beliefs seriously, must, in spite of Mr. 
Sidgwick, arrive at pretty different treatments 
of responsibility. 

Naturally in this matter I go with the lib- 
ertarians. The deterministic basis of responsi- 
bility, the continuity of past forces, has no 
moral interest for me. Continuity there cer- 
tainly must be before responsibility can arise, 
and I see that the liberty of indifference de- 
stroys it. But continuity is not all. The planet 
Mars has continuity in plenty, but is not a re- 
sponsible being, not even though we should 
imagine it to be the shaper of our destinies. 
The kind of continuity requisite for morality 
is an antesequential continuity of interest and 
purpose. We become blamable not because 
certain constant forces have been operating on 
us, but because we might have held steadfastly 
to an approved end. A man who has so fully 
accepted a drunkard's character that he is now 
cut off from choosing any other we rightly 
call irresponsible. Yet only then, according to 
determinism, would his responsibility have 
reached its height. 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 201 

Under determinism a new meaning would 
need to be found for " ought." That stately 
term has generally appeared in cases of con- 
flict between the instinctive, passionate, habit- 
ual sides of our nature and standards of ap- 
proved conduct at present unrealized. But if 
unrealized possibilities are to disappear and 
the future is to be only the past in a new 
guise, it would be well to abolish the word 
" ought," as Bentham advised. In the natural 
sciences, where only a single event is conceived 
as possible, we describe it carefully but do not 
set up standards to which it should conform. 
Deterministic text-books of ethics should, in 
my judgment, be confined to the same de- 
scriptive work. 

In this survey of the influence of the two 
doctrines I may be expected to utter a warn- 
ing against the enfeebling effects of determ- 
inism. Will not he who supposes he is no 
creative self capable of directing the course of 
the oncoming past find that his manly powers 
decay? The evidence is conflicting. Fatalism 
was first formulated for the Western world by 
the Stoics, the most strenuous moralists of 
Greece, and opposed by the light-minded Ep- 
icureans. It was the faith of the conquering 



202 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

followers of Mohammed. It fashioned Calvin, 
Cromwell's Puritans, Jonathan Edwards. We 
catch suggestion of it in Luther's " Ich kann 
nicht anders," in Emerson's smile, in the wan 
faces of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. 
All these men were strong through having no 
will of their own. But it must be added that 
they held fast to a will of God. Determinism has 
a natural affiliation with religion, and the merg- 
ing of the two has often brought men vigor. 
But it is also the usual creed of the weak, the 
despairing, the vicious. Most of Shakespere's 
rascals put off their crimes on the stars, as our 
modern ne'er-do-weels complain that their luck 
is down on them. Perhaps we can best sum 
up the matter by saying that he who will go 
on to power must lean on an intelligent and 
righteous will, his own or God's, or better 
still — both. A world without a steadfast will 
is a shaky affair. Drifting with casual circum- 
stance and uncriticized habit has always brought 
weakness. But whether a serious determinist 
is more liable to these dangers than a capri- 
cious libertarian, I am not prepared to say. 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 203 

VII 

Two cautions against possible misunder- 
standing seem in place before I close. This 
book has throughout accepted a two -world 
theory and has spoken as if mind and matter 
were independent affairs, each having its own 
laws and contributing its peculiar type of cau- 
sation toward shaping the compound creature 
man. Such language does not express my full 
belief. I doubt if there is any sequential cau- 
sation without antesequential, and am sure 
there is no antesequential without sequential. 
Teleology and mechanism are probably much 
more closely allied than I have thought it ne- 
cessary to assert. Laws of nature I believe to 
be ideal constructions formulated by man for 
his convenience and with little reality if parted 
from intelligent ends. For me, a moderate 
idealist, mind is no accident, projected into an 
alien world at a comparatively late period and 
fashioned out of already existing material. I 
regard it rather as the originating and explan- 
atory factor conditioning all. But I see no 
need of exacting such beliefs from my readers, 
beliefs which would require a volume as long 
as the present to substantiate. On such ideal- 



204 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 

istic faith the doctrine of freedom which I 
have urged is not dependent. It may equally 
well be held by a natural realist. In expound- 
ing it I have found the language of common 
life economical. That language, though in my 
view inadequate, is not untrue. So genuine 
and important is the dualistic distinction which 
it marks that human intercourse could hardly 
proceed without it. The world certainly does 
present a twofold aspect, and we adjust our 
conduct with reference now to one phase of 
it, now to the other. That is all that my ar- 
gument requires. Ulterior questions about 
which of the two aspects is more fundamental 
lie outside my present inquiry; and if my 
words have seemed to commit me to a certain 
philosophic belief, I here disclaim it. 

Again, as a pedagogue prizing definiteness, 
I have undoubtedly made consciousness too 
prominent. Such terms as choice, decision, 
grounds for action, depicted future possibility^ 
represent the one who acts as clearly aware of 
what he is doing and might even suggest that 
without that vividness of thought conduct 
would cease to be moral. But nothing like 
this is the case. Conduct is never excellent 
till it has become unconsciously habitual. Con- 



VARIETIES OF DOCTRINE 205 

scious criticism is needed for the formation 
of habit and from time to time subsequently 
for correction. But the general work of the 
day is best managed in partial blindness. 
The only essential is that an end be sought, 
an end expressive of the interests of the 
seeker. Precisely how much conscious atten- 
tion shall be given to that end at the moment 
of seeking is a subordinate matter. In explain- 
ing the process I have found it necessary 
to bring all its details fully before the mind, 
but that is not the method of swift nature. 
In the last chapter of my little book, The 
Nature of Goodness, I have discussed the office 
of consciousness at length. Here I will only 
say that no feature of modern philosophy 
strikes me as more sane or helpful than the 
increased importance it attaches to the un- 
consciousness side of life. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



To give here anything approaching a full biblio- 
graphy of Freedom is impossible and far from my 
purpose. The papers, chapters, and volumes re- 
lating to it would fill a library. Each age produces 
a new crop and the soil of all countries seems about 
equally favorable to their growth. I must make a 
selection. I make it for popular use and entirely on 
grounds of ease, convenience and interest. Who- 
ever has followed this discussion is open to solicit- 
ation to explore the subject farther, provided an 
attractive piece is offered him, in a book easily 
accessible, and with an aim not too scientific. I 
name therefore only a few titles, all of them Eng- 
lish, and am careful that the pieces have an inter- 
esting style and are contained in volumes to be had 
from any public library, or indeed from many pri- 
vate ones. What strikes me as important is that 
my readers should become acquainted with some 
other doctrine than the one advanced here, or at least 
some other than the doctrine to which their mind 
at present inclines. Until we understand the objec- 
tions to any line of thought we do not understand 
that thought ; nor can we feel the full force of such 
objections until we have them urged upon us by 



208 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

one who believes them. Probably I shall make the 
literature of freedom most inviting if I exhibit 
it in two lists, libertarian and deterministic, and 
briefly characterize the book or article named. 
Of course it will be understood how inexact such 
groups must be, including as they do widely diverse 
thinkers who are united rather by general tendency 
than by allegiance to any specified doctrine. Pos- 
sibly in some cases the writers themselves would 
not accept my classification. 

n 

Modern English determinism has its classic ex- 
pression in the writings of John Stuart Mill, in 
his Logic, bk. VI, chap, n, and his Examination of 
the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, chap, 
xxvi. His coadjutor, Alexander Bain, goes over 
the same ground more dryly in his Emotions and 
the Will, pt. ii, chap. xi. Herbert Spencer's 
brief discussion is in his Psychology, § 219. His 
American disciple, John Fiske, has stated the 
case with extraordinary enthusiasm and charm in 
his Cosmic Philosophy, pt. n, chap. 17. Leslie 
Stephen's discussion in his Science of Ethics, 
chap, vii, § 15, is brief but pungent. H. P. Buckle 
shows his usual hard clearness in his History of 
Civilization, chap. i. A massive and square-cut 
presentation, offering much substance in small com- 
pass, but somewhat formal, wooden, and lacking 
in half-shades, is that of J. M. E. McTaggart in 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 209 

Some Dogmas of Religion, chap. v. Richer, sub- 
tler, with closer relations to life, yet not less exact 
and earnest, are the arguments of A. O. Taylor, 
Elements of Metaphysics, bk. iv, chap. 4; of T. 
Fowler, Principles of Morals, chap, ix ; of G. S. 
Fullerton, A System of Metaphysics, chap, xxxni; 
of F. Thilly, Introduction to Ethics, chap, xi ; F. 
Paulsen, System of Ethics, bk. n, chap. 9. An ex- 
ceptionally comprehensive and attractive paper is 
that by Eliza Ritchie, on " Ethical Implications of 
Determinism," in the Philosophical Review for 
September, 1893. Of the older English writers, 
three deserve emphatic mention, David Hume, 
Essay on Liberty and Necessity ; Joseph Priest- 
ley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity ; Jon- 
athan Edwards, On the Witt. 

in 

Those whom I have ventured to call Idealistic 
Determinists may be represented by J. H. Bradley, 
Ethical Studies, Essay I ; T. H. Green, Philo- 
sophical Works, II, 308-33 ; E. Caird's Critical 
Philosophy of Kant, bk. n, chap. in. But all these 
writers, having lived long with German metaphys- 
ics, employ a difficult style. A simpler presenta- 
tion of their doctrine will be found in J. S. 
Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics, chap. vin. 



210 , BIBLIOGRAPHY 

IV 

Professor William James's essay on " The Di- 
lemma of Determinism," now published in his vol- 
ume of papers entitled The Will to Believe, has 
drawn much public attention to the libertarian cause. 
Though it deals with only a few aspects of the con- 
troversy, its brilliant style, candor, and personal 
charm have given it wide currency. The most elab- 
orate, careful, and at the same time engaging de- 
fence of freedom is that by James Martineau in his 
Study of Religion, bk. ill, chap. II, A fresh and 
searching paper was published by W. R. Boyce 
Gibson in the volume entitled Personal Idealism. 
P. Janet, Theory of Morals, bk. in, chaps. Yi and 
vn, is strikingly neat and persuasive. So is James 
Seth, Study of Ethical Principles, pt. in, chap. I. 
Strong presentations not altogether easy are given 
by H. Lotze, Microcosmos, bk. II, chap, v, § 5, and 
hi3 Practical Philosophy, chap. in. H. Miinster- 
berg has important though brief remarks in his 
Eternal Values, p. 145. J. Ward's two volumes 
on Naturalism and Agnosticism, are throughout 
an elaborate commentary on the inadequacies of 
mechanism, but they require close attention. The 
same may be said of H. Bergson's Time and Free 
Will. Well instructed and readable chapters will 
be found in B. P. Bowne's Introduction to Psycho- 
logical Theory, G. P. Ladd's Philosophy of Con- 
duct, J. Hyslop's Elements of Ethics. E. Kelley'in 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 211 

his little book, Evolution and Effort^ chaps, m-v, 
gives a stirring popular account of the practical 
effects which he believes attend the two doctrines. 
Of a widely different style are the series of letters 
written by R. G. Hazard to J. S. Mill under the 
title Causation and Freedom in Willing, and a 
similar volume, subsequently written, entitled Man 
as a Creative First Cause, 



There have been several attempts to survey the 
whole controversy from the beginning and to state 
the beliefs of all philosophers on this particular 
point. Alexander Bain has such a sketch in the 
appendix to his Mental Science. It is comprehens- 
ive and shows a strong purpose to be fair minded. 
But it is brief, and Bain's ability to comprehend 
opinions different from his own is not considerable. 
A longer, more recent and more satisfactory sum- 
mary is the little volume by A. Alexander, The- 
ories of the Will, 



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